Fish Detecting Using YOLOv4 and CVAE in Aquaculture Ponds with a Non-Uniform Strong Reflection Background

Abstract

Accurate fish detection is of great significance in aquaculture. However, the non-uniform strong reflection in aquaculture ponds will affect the precision of fish detection. This paper combines YOLOv4 and CVAE to accurately detect fishes in the image with non-uniform strong reflection, in which the reflection in the image is removed at first and then the reflection-removed image is provided for fish detecting. Firstly, the improved YOLOv4 is applied to detect and mask the strong reflective region, to locate and label the reflective region for the subsequent reflection removal. Then, CVAE is combined with the improved YOLOv4 for inferring the priori distribution of the Reflection region and restoring the Reflection region by the distribution so that the reflection can be removed. For further improving the quality of the reflection-removed images, the adversarial learning is appended to CVAE. Finally, YOLOV4 is used to detect fishes in the high quality image. In addition, a new image dataset of pond cultured takifugu rubripes is constructed,, which includes 1000 images with fishes annotated manually, also a synthetic dataset including 2000 images with strong reflection is created and merged with the generated dataset for training and verifying the robustness of the proposed method. Comprehensive experiments are performed to compare the proposed method with the state-of-the-art fish detecting methods without reflection removal on the generated dataset. The results show that the fish detecting precision and recall of the proposed method are improved by 2.7% and 2.4% respectively.