FishSense: Underwater RGBD Imaging for Fish Measurement

There is a need for reliable underwater fish monitoring systems that can provide oceanographers and researchers with valuable data about life underwater. Most current methods rely heavily on human observation which is both error prone and costly. FishSense provides a solution that accelerates the use of depth cameras underwater, opening the door to 3D underwater imaging that is fast, accurate, cost effective, and energy efficient. FishSense is a sleek handheld underwater imaging device that captures both depth and color images. This data has been used to calculate the length of fish, which can be used to derive biomass and health. The FishSense platform has been tested through two separate deployments. The first deployment imaged a toy fish of known length and volume within a controlled testing pool. The second deployment was conducted within an 70,000 gallon aquarium tank with multiple species of fish. A Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve has been computed based on the detector’s performance across all images, and the mean and standard deviation of the length measurements of the detections has been computed.