Biomass Estimation of a Popular Aquarium Fish Using an Acoustic Signal Processing Technique with Three Acoustic Sensors

The popular aquarium fish called damselfish, sometimes called demoiselle also, is a small, tropical, marine fish of the family Pomacentridae (order Perciformes). It is seen in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific oceans and is composed of about 250 species. Beside aquarium uses, these types of fish are precious because of their ecological and economic worth. Therefore, a proper estimation of their biomass is a significant task. However, the conventional techniques for estimating fish-biomass are visual sampling techniques, raft and floating radio frequency identification tag systems, minnow traps, removal method of population estimation, etc., which are complex, costly and human-interactive. To get rid of these problems, in this paper, we propose a passive acoustic technique for estimating damselfish biomass. The estimation process is based on the production of an acoustic signal called “chirp signal” by damselfish species during swimming within their territory. In this article, we have presented a theoretical method of biomass estimation that is verified by simulation and the performance of the estimation is evaluated for different fish distributions. We have found that Exponential distribution of damselfish produce best results among the three distributions, i.e., Exponential, Normal, and Rayleigh, of damselfish.