Fish Detection Using Deep Learning Recently, human beingxe2x80x99s curiosity has been expanded from the land to the sky and the sea. Besides sending people to explore the ocean and outer space, robots are designed for some tasks dangerous for living creatures. Take the ocean exploration for an example. There are many projects or competitions on the design of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) which attracted many interests. Authors of this article have learned the necessity of platform upgrade from a previous AUV design project, and would like to share the experience of one task extension in the area of fish detection. Because most of the embedded systems have been improved by fast growing computing and sensing technologies, which makes them possible to incorporate more and more complicated algorithms. In an AUV, after acquiring surrounding information from sensors, how to perceive and analyse corresponding information for better judgement is one of the challenges. The processing procedure can mimic human beingxe2x80x99s learning routines. An advanced system with more computing power can facilitate deep learning feature, which exploit many neural network algorithms to simulate human brains. In this paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based fish detection method was proposed. The training data set was collected from the Gulf of Mexico by a digital camera. To fit into this unique need, three optimization approaches were applied to the CNN: data augmentation, network simplification, and training process speed up. Data augmentation transformation provided more learning samples; the network was simplified to accommodate the artificial neural network; the training process speed up is introduced to make the training process more time efficient. Experimental results showed that the proposed model is promising, and has the potential to be extended to other underwear objects.

Automatic Hierarchical Classification of Kelps using Deep Residual Features. Across the globe, remote image data is rapidly being collected for the assessment of benthic communities from shallow to extremely deep waters on continental slopes to the abyssal seas. Exploiting this data is presently limited by the time it takes for experts to identify organisms found in these images. With this limitation in mind, a large effort has been made globally to introduce automation and machine learning algorithms to accelerate both classification and assessment of marine benthic biota. One major issue lies with organisms that move with swell and currents, like kelps. This paper presents an automatic hierarchical classification method (local binary classification as opposed to the conventional flat classification) to classify kelps in images collected by autonomous underwater vehicles. The proposed kelp classification approach exploits learned feature representations extracted from deep residual networks. We show that these generic features outperform the traditional offtheshelf CNN features and the conventional handcrafted features. Experiments also demonstrate that the hierarchical classification method outperforms the traditional parallel multiclass classifications by a significant margin (90.0% vs 57.6% and 77.2% vs 59.0%) on Benthoz15 and Rottnest datasets respectively. Furthermore, we compare different hierarchical classification approaches and experimentally show that the sibling hierarchical training approach outperforms the inclusive hierarchical approach by a significant margin. We also report an application of our proposed method to study the change in kelp cover over time for annually repeated AUV surveys.