A ShuffleNet Architecture-Based Multi-Layer Feature Scaling and Fusion Approach for Underwater Net Cage Damage Detection in Aquaculture

In offshore aquaculture operations, personnel equipped with diving gear are often necessary to inspect the underwater net cages for damage, particularly on the sea floor. This manual inspection process is time-consuming and complex. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a computer vision solution for identifying damage in underwater net cages to address the inefficiencies and challenges of traditional manual inspections. The proposed scheme utilizes a high-performance multi-branch computational architecture designed based on ShuffleNet architecture to detect net cage damage more efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate that this work performs well on the ImageNet ILSVRC-2010 dataset and achieves an accuracy of 88.54% in underwater net damage detection.