Automatic Nile Tilapia fish classification approach using machine learning techniques

Commonly, aquatic experts use traditional methods such as casting nets or underwater human monitoring for detecting existence and quantities of different species of fish. However, the recent breakthrough in digital cameras and storage abilities, with consequent cost reduction, can be utilized for automatically observing different underwater species. This article introduces an automatic classification approach for the Nile Tilapia fish using support vector machines (SVMs) algorithm in conjunction with feature extraction techniques based on Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) algorithms. The core of this approach is to apply the feature extraction algorithms in order to describe local features extracted from a set of fish images. Then, the proposed approach classifies the fish images using a number of support vector machines classifiers to differentiate between fish species. Experimental results obtained show that the support vector machines algorithm outperformed other machine learning techniques, such as artificial neural networks (ANN) and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithms, in terms of the overall classification accuracy.