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Digital Camera Could Help Sort Fish, Save Stocks 103

Posted by Hemos from the saving-the-world,-one-fish-at-a-time dept.
MountainSplash writes "PlanetArk.com is carrying a story about a new camera that "takes a digital photograph of the catch which is then divided into a grid, allowing a computer to measure the shape and color of each fish in the grid. It needs one tenth of a second and identifies 98 percent of fish correctly." The claim is that fish can then be culled quicker possibly increasing the likelyhood of survival for the incidental catch in the net. Testing is being done by Norway's Institute of Marine Research and Norwegian marine electronics maker Scantrol. Onboard testing has proven highly successful, but underwater attempts still need more work. With everything we have all been seeing computers do the last few years, I personally found this to be one of the more interesting of late."
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Digital Camera Could Help Sort Fish, Save Stocks More

Digital Camera Could Help Sort Fish, Save Stocks

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  • Socks (Score:5, Funny)

    by derphilipp ( 745164 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:01AM (#8292857) Homepage
    And i first read it would recognize socks - would be a great invention if built-in in laundrys: Never loose a second sock or try to find the one you are missing !
    • Yes, but you would have to buy plaid, striped, and other multi-color socks so that the system could sort them out by each sock's "specie".

    • Wouldn't work (Score:3, Funny)

      by Walkiry ( 698192 )
      Everyone knows socks morph into boxers/briefs (whatever you use) during laundry.

      Think about it, you run out of paired socks but you rarely run out of boxers.
      • You know, it's really not that hard to keep track of your socks...

        All you need to do is wash them in pairs. If you don't split them up, you won't end up with mismatched socks. Because, contrary to popular belief, dryers don't eat socks.
        • No, dryers don't, but socks can slip over the lip of the rotating tub in the washer.
          • I have never seen a slashdot article on this, so I have a hard time believing it.

            --
            Sick of people trashing Debian? Me too! Check my sig. My homepage has additional information.
          • Nah, I blame the sock gnomes.

            1. Steal socks.
            2. ????
            3. Profit!

            However, this fish camera give their competitors a technological advantage...

            1. Buy fish-identifying camera
            2. ????
            3. Save socks!

            The sock gnomes have had to develop an even cleverer counter-technology:

            1. Develop sock-identifying camera
            2. Steal more socks!
            3. ????
            4. Profit!

            Thus, the majority of socks going missing are clearly the fault of the sock gnomes.
        • Ha! Tell that to Rocko!

        • True story... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by sean.peters ( 568334 )
          When I was in the Navy, my ship went into the shipyard for an overhaul - among the equipment scheduled for repair was one of the ship's massive clothes dryers. When the tumbler was removed from its spindle, repair workers found... you guessed it... an enormous bundle of yarn wrapped around the spindle - the remains of uncounted socks the dryer had "eaten" over the years.

          No kidding.

          Sean
        • I always count my socks into the washer in pairs and don't seem to have a problem. I guess a sock could conceivably be thrown against the port-hole and work its way down between the front of the inner {revolving} drum and the {outer} static drum, but there isn't a lot of room there on modern machines -- you want to minimise the amount of water not doing much {although its cleaning power is diminished by having taken some dirt, so you will never be able to reduce water consumption below a certain minimum -
    • That's wierd - I read it as "Digital Camera Could Help Save Fish Sticks". I love dyxlesia.

      In any event, I have fish sticks in the microwave now. Thank you, slashdot.

    • I never have problems finding SOCKS. apt-get install danted always works for me.
    • I think a much better application would be a software that'd tell me if I'm wearing matching clothes or not.
      • I think a much better application would be software that'd tell me if I'm wearing clothes or not.

        Apparently pants are a requisite part of office attire.

    • We didnt have such a problem. All our socks were red and distributed EVENLY among the citizens.

  • ya know, if I had any input on this project, (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:02AM (#8292859)
    I'd be forced to add cartoon drawings of 'charlie' from starkist into the 'endangered' database

  • Great Technology that will never be used (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 0mni ( 734493 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:03AM (#8292869)
    Somehow I doubt that there will be much of a migration into any kind of system such as this. A large proportion of the fishing industry uses as little technology as possible as break-downs cannot be repaired until the ship returns to port, maybe not until after then. That would mean a large amount of losses for a fishing company. There is no point over complicating things that can be achieved simpily.
    • No kidding. Can't you just see the old guy on his rickety fishing boat with a $25,000 high-tech digital fish-sorting contraption?
    • Then again, it looks like if they can make it reliable enough, it could make a big difference - if the fishermen are throwing out 1/3rd of their catch. And even if they can't - it'll save the money until it breaks down, then they just do it the old fashioned way until they get back to harbour! So it's allowed to be either pretty cheap or pretty reliable.
      • Well if I am reading this article correctly they will only save around 7.3% so it isnt that much of a gain, more that that would most likely be saved by better fishing practices.

      • ...if the fishermen are throwing out 1/3rd of their catch...

        Actually the smaller operations can and do sort by hand as a matter of line fishing.

        The problems come from the large factory trawlers. Because of the way the fish asphyxiate in the trawler nets, there is no advantage to sorting them. In fact, some larger vessels grind the dead fish to chum to avoid having incriminating dead fish floating on the surface. In contrast, smaller operations (say a 2 man boat at the smallest), line fish and pull i

    • Re:Great Technology that will never be used (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DRUNK_BEAR ( 645868 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:10AM (#8292924)
      Well I have to counterbalance your statement. It is true that the fishing industry utilizes very small amount of technology, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it shouldn't use any. This project is a very good example of a technology that can guarantee the survival of this lucrative activity for a longer period. And I am sure that if the technology fails during a trip out at sea, the fishermen will go back to the old techniques without much problems.
    • I agree, however it will be touted as new, green and safe, and used as part of a PR campaign to justify and extend massive overfishing.

      We will then be sold Genetically Engineered/farmed fish substitute and told how much better it is for the environment, jobs and the economy that those stinky wild fish which swim in their own excrement (eeew!)

  • How and when is the picture taken? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DRUNK_BEAR ( 645868 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:06AM (#8292896)

    The story fails to mention when and how the picture is taken. I believe for this to be effective, no two fishes must be too close nor on top of each other. Anyone has more technical details on the process?

  • Some problems need to be sorted? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by banana fiend ( 611664 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:08AM (#8292908)
    Aside from the pun, the camera can be linked to a sorting device - so that it can .... what? NOT dump the fish? Also, this reduces the waste to ... 25% - down from 33% - not a gigantic saving. Every little bit helps.

    All in all, short on detail, and how it will reduce waste, lets see them sort the fish and reject the unwanted ones BEFORE the die from exhaustion on board

  • Bycatch is a big problem... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by terraformer ( 617565 ) <tpb@pervici.com> on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:10AM (#8292922) Journal
    ...but I seriously doubt that the fishing industry will adopt this without legislative mandate. What happens now is that when fisherman haul in a catch, they sort out all prohibited/undersireable fish. They throw overboard that bycatch regardless is the fish are alive or dead. There is no record of what their bycatch was and they suffer no consequences for this bycatch. With this system, there is now a record of the bycatch and it will provide empirical proof of the bycatch problem and therefore ammo to those looking to clean up the fishing industry.

    • Re:Bycatch is a big problem... (Score:5, Informative)

      by tropicflite ( 319208 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:55AM (#8293157)

      It was a tough call for me whether to mod you up, or add to your idea. Bycatch is a horrible problem [oceana.org] that gets almost no notice. IMO, fishing in general is brutal and ugly, but I understand that not everyone is vegetarian (as I am). Anything that can be done to minimize the harm brought by the fishing industry to the the ocean environment (on the large scale) and to the individual sea creatures (on the small scale) is a step in the right direction.

      If you eat fish you bear some of the responsibility for the bycatch problem by creating the demand. If the price of fish goes up a bit to pay for this equipment, that seems reasonable.

      Not to go overboard (heh) on the topic, it's just responsible stewardship to minimize the negative impact of the fishing industry by fishing as cleanly and sustainably as possible.

  • Use this here (Score:4, Funny)

    by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:10AM (#8292923) Homepage Journal
    If only the system could help sort trolls on Slashdot. *Sigh*

  • Pattern recognition (Score:5, Informative)

    by erixtark ( 413840 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:14AM (#8292946)
    This is just one example of the increased power of automated pattern recognition. Once computers reach a level of vision close to humans, we will se an explosion in automated tasks. Other examples include Sony Aibos vision [zdnet.co.uk], lip-reading software [zdnet.co.uk] that helps in speech recognition, 'robot scientists' [nationalgeographic.com] and the next generation of speech recognition [eurekalert.org] with the potential to revolutionize human computer interaction. HAL, is that you?

  • Is this the real problem? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WayneConrad ( 312222 ) * <wconrad@noSPAm.yagni.com> on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:16AM (#8292954) Homepage

    Is the real problem that we're killing too many of the fishes we didn't intend to catch? Or is it that we're catching too many fish? [abc.net.au]

    • The problem is that there are too many damn whales, eating all the fish :-/ (they propose a simple solution).

    • Re:Is this the real problem? (Score:5, Informative)

      by kinnell ( 607819 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:55AM (#8293155)
      Is the real problem that we're killing too many of the fishes we didn't intend to catch? Or is it that we're catching too many fish?

      From a European perspective, the former. The North Sea cod population is in danger of being wiped out because of haddock fishing. The stocks of haddock are fine, but because the fish are similar, there is a big problem with cod being caught accidentally. There has been an ongoing battle between the EU, which has struggled to impose restrictive quotas, and the fishing industry which is on the point of collapse. If it were feasible to raise the fishing quotas without endangering cod supplies, it would be better for everyone.

      • The stocks of haddock are fine, but because the fish are similar, there is a big problem with cod being caught accidentally.

        Just imagine how big the problem would be if instead the fish were congruent. Even cameras couldn't tell the difference!

      • If it were feasible to raise the fishing quotas without endangering cod supplies...

        Quotas are part of the problem. Look what happened to the salmon on the east coast of north America, or the blue pike in the great lakes. Below a certain threshold, the pike just vanished. But quotas are only part of the problem.

        The North Atlantic cod are wiped out even in areas where the water once could be so full that it looked like it boild. What's needed are better fishing methods where there is little or no "

  • Part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Walkiry ( 698192 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:17AM (#8292961) Homepage
    Don't forget that quick sorting is only part of the problem, not the whole thing. Another important factor is that fish are wounded/damaged by the nets even if they are smaller than the holes, they lose scales and the wounds get infected (hence they end up dying anyway). This has been somewhat improved with modern nets but still needs work.

    Anyway, props to them with this new system. Despite what the tree-huggers may say, we need the fishing industry to feed ourselves, and the better we can catch the appropiate fish while leaving the rest undisturbed, the better.
    • How can fish get infected wounds? I thought it was next to impossible to get infected in salt water, due to the effects of osmosis on the germs (like sprinkling salt on a leech).
      • Well you see, the parasites that affect you or land animals or fresh water fish are used to not having high salt contents, but the parasites of marine fish are perfectly happy with that. Ask any aquarium enthusiast that keeps salt water fish ;)

    • Don't forget that quick sorting is only part of the problem, not the whole thing

      Besides, in a deep-sea environment, bubble-sorting is pretty efficient.

  • Bah. Fish! (Score:2, Funny)

    by plams ( 744927 )

    Bah. Fish! How do you sell crap like that?

    Now, if it could crawl the net, and find stuff matching your preferences... hell, think of the oceans of time I would stop wasting looking for quality pr0n and "+5 funny" posts.

  • Pattern matching (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CvD ( 94050 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:18AM (#8292963) Homepage Journal
    Gee, I wonder what kind of pattern matching/classification algorithm it is using. 98% is pretty damn high. Really high. That is a very robust algorithm indeed.

    If it can be applied to fish, it can be applied to nearly any kind of object that needs to be identified. I would really like more technical details, as I am very sceptical of this 98% business.

    Searching for 'automatic "fish classification"' doesn't turn up much...

    I'm guessing it's a neural network or some other sort of classifier that has been trained with existing pictures of fish.
    • Hohum...

      How hard it can be to do this, if the vending machines can already distinguish pretty clever counterfeits bank notes.
      • Yeah, but banknotes have counterfeiting stuff builtin, which the vending machine can check for. See this How Stuff Works article [howstuffworks.com] on the subject of currency detection. Its very informative.

        The specific attributes of banknotes are only a few... while if you have some random bits of fish in the part of the grid you are analysing, there are only vague outlines to work with.

        Granted, the camera will know how far away it is from the fish, so it can determine size and so on, but other features will be less easy t
      • The bank notes (bills here in America)

        1. are in a given orientation
        2. are designed to be recognized automatically
        3. aren't squirming around
        4. won't die if you need to run them through the system 5 times.

        The other thing is that if a vending machine rejects 50% of real bills, there's no real loss, so they can afford to up the sensitivity - the customer will just curse under his breath and shove the thing back in.

        Try selling a system with that kind of false negative rate to the fishing industry.
    • A neural net working in conjunction with a fishing net. Two nets working towards the same goal.
    • Maybe they did the testing with regular bettas and glo-fish [glofish.com].

      The morality of THIS endeavor is a subject for a separate discussion, I believe.

    • The pattern matching doesn't have to be all that great when you consider the limited number types of fish they catch. Also, they probably don't have a long list of "this is type a, this is type b", the list is probably more along the lines of "salmon, not a salmon."

  • Use of technology (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SimianOverlord ( 727643 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:18AM (#8292965) Homepage Journal
    Hmmm...I'd read this as being more useful for scientific studies of fish stocks, rather than for the fishing industry. I mean, I'm sure both would find it useful, but the cost and reliability issues would rule it out for the majority of fishermen, as a few other posters have already said.

    Good technology for scientists, especially if they are keen on returning live fish to the sea as far as is possible. Fish stock estimation is pretty unreliable as is, at least in the UK. Maybe something like this would help.

  • Nice, but typical marketing optimism... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ControlFreal ( 661231 ) * <niek@@@bergboer...net> on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:26AM (#8292998) Journal

    IAACVPS (I Am A Computer Vision Ph.D. Student), and I'd like to add some general remarks concerning this application, and concerning computer vision in general.

    Although the article mentions a nice application of computer vision, it is shockingly sparse in details. This in itself is not so strange for a news-site, but the fact that they didn't include a link to a more detailed description is a pity.

    Some ideas:

    First, the article doesn't make sufficiently clear whether one looks at the net, full of fish, or that one looks at the fish all spread out on a flat surface. If one looks at a full net, one can only see the fish on the outside, i.e., only a small fraction: that doesn't provide any information on the fish on the inside. If one looks at the fish spread out on a flat surface, one can see all the fish, but there are a number of issues here:

    • Orientation-variance: if a fish is lying head-down (e.g. because it is crammed a bit too tightly between other fish), it's hard to measure its size.
    • Occlusion: Even on a flat surface, on fish' tail might cover part of another fish' body. This makes measuring difficult.
    • Lighting-variance: Fish are shiny reflective critter. So some parts of the image might have very white spots in them. This makes the application of automated algorithms difficult. Make no mistake: we as humans can recognize objects almost irrespective of the intensity and color of the light, but computer vision algorithms have severe difficulties doing this!
    • Determination of number: How, exactly, do they count the fish, given all the difficulties listed above? So: what does that 90-something% accuracy mean?

    Given the speed at which they process, it's most likely that they determine fish-size based on general statistical properties in different regions of the image. In that case, the 90-something% accuracy really doesn't mean that much, because in all honesty, I don't see how they can either measure or guarantee that. Looks like marketing optimism to me.

    Now, on the general state of computer vision: If you're expecting terminator-like all-seeing computer in the near future, don't hold your breath! It might take some time:

    At the moment, some object classes that don't vary too much in structure within the class (e.g., faces, cars, people), can be found reasonably quickly and moderately reliably in an image. To give an example, the detection of human faces in 800x600 images can be done in about a second, with about a 90-95% detection rate, but with about 1-10 false positive detections per image. That effectively means that if you find a face, there still is only a 30% change that it's actually a face.

    In order to understand what you see, you rely on high-level semantics. These include the geometrical arrangement of objects (e.g., your head stands on top of your body, there is a hierarchy body->limbs->extremities, etc.) and general relations (e.g. finding faces at eye-level, so e.g. near the horizon). Research on these higher-level semantics is really in its infancy: the main problem is that it's very hard to get enough "world-knowledge" into the computer for it to make all the relations.

    I can put a nice multiple-frame face-detection demo here, but that would destroy my research group's net-connection. If someone can offer a high-bandwidth spot, mail me: I'll then make a movie available.

    • Aside from that, the classification of fishes is something that changes very, very regularly - ichtyologists are constantly regrouping, splitting species into several or merging them again.

      This device is not "as good as a human", it actually does its ichtyologist counterparts one better!

      Sounds like some industry reps are trying to save their asses if you ask me...
    • I can put a nice multiple-frame face-detection demo here, but that would destroy my research group's net-connection. If someone can offer a high-bandwidth spot, mail me: I'll then make a movie available.

      Ok, there goes:

      Face Detection .torrent [unimaas.nl].

      Ok, PLEASE leave your client open: I don't want my connection killed! ;)

  • fish (Score:5, Funny)

    by capoccia ( 312092 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:28AM (#8293013) Journal
    so we can recognize fish but not faces? this is the same technology that so miserably fails to recognize faces in real life but works so marvelously in marketting demonstrations.

    • Re:fish (Score:2, Funny)

      by AndroidCat ( 229562 )
      Perhaps Homeland Security can use it to catch terrorist fish? What we really need is software to recognize marketing BS.

    • Re:fish (Score:3, Informative)

      by erixtark ( 413840 )
      Recognising faces is extremely difficult [sciencedaily.com]. It's one of those social functions that humans have evolved to perform with ease, but it also requires a significant portion of the brain to do it.
    • Please. Telling one species of fish from another is as easy as telling an arab from a norwegian, though fish profiling is PC. You are not trying to discerne one individual tuna identity from another individual tuna identity. Of course, racial profiling is 'wrong' for people, but fishy profiling is entirely appropriate when you are trying to save SOME of the fish.

      I am sure there would be objections if you used this system to screen which people you want to rescue from a sinking ship...

  • so what is the big deal; now you can verify what you knew was happening anyway? maybe if the camera had a robotic arm that yanked the offender out of the net and put it directly in my can of "Chicken of the Sea"...

  • Free advice to save fish stocks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:36AM (#8293053)

    stop being so fucking greedy with your satellite fish finders and 5 mile fishing nets

    i have absolutely no sympathy for industries that through only their own greed and short term stupidity put themselves out of buisness, fishing had survived for thousands of years till fish finders,5 mile nets, 10000 ton ships etc etc, you don't have to be a fucking genius to work out their real problems are, and they think taking pictures will help them

    the phrase "did they really think it would last forever"
    comes to mind

    of course greed is the behaviour mankind will realise is wrong after we have pissed away all earths natural resources and we are left sitting on a dust ball wondering what happened

    A>S

  • This has been done for a while... (Score:4, Informative)

    by dBLiSS ( 513375 ) <theking54.gmail@com> on Monday February 16, 2004 @09:07AM (#8293241) Journal
    The company I worked for a couple years back was a seafood company. I worked at a clam processing plant and they used digital camera's and computer software to take a picture of each clam as it went along the conveyor belt. The computer then graded the clam depending on size and colour. They have been using this process for atleast 4 to 5 years now.

  • Hrm (Score:3, Funny)

    by IgnorantKnucklehead ( 324494 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @09:21AM (#8293335) Homepage Journal
    The whole thing sounds fishy to me.

  • Very useful in fish farming. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2004 @09:52AM (#8293609)
    I know for a fact that a similar system, have been developed in the late 90's for estimating [storvik.no] the weight of fish inside a fish cage. This is good because knowing the size and distribution of fish in stock makes planning of food, harvest insurance etc much simpler. This system uses simple pattern recognition for separating the farmed fish from intruders etc. I would imagine such a system becoming very useful for the fish farming industry where separation in size etc is an issue.
  • Since I am on internet (many years ago) I know the FishCam [netscape.com] :)

    M.
    --
    incuso [altervista.org]

  • The number of endangered and protected species slaughtered by Japan's massive fishing industry is appaling. And the Japanese government thinks its A-O-K, as long as the price of sushi stays down. Maybe this system could help stop overfishing/killing of certain species which aren't harvested for food anyway.

    Not sure if they would even bother though. Japan is one of only two countries that refuses to respect the international whaling treaty. Endangered whale meat is sold on store shelves, and sometimes even

  • Better idea (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ajs318 ( 655362 )
    Drastically reduce commercial fishing, if it cannot be eliminated altogether.

    This isn't just another vegetarian / vegan rant. I've nothing against anybody eating all the beef, lamb, pork and so on they want. Or even a few fish, if they caught them themselves. But commercial fishing is ruining the sea.

    Land meat is generally farmed. That is, for every pig that gets turned into sausages, at least one pig is raised to replace it. {The exception is game, but we can assume due to its comparative rarity f
  • I saw a PBS special some time ago on salmon migration. There are special "fish ladders" that allow the salmon to swim upstream around the dams. On many of the ladders, they have an area where fish swim past a window. People sit in front of these windows and count each type of fish as they go past.

    I wonder if this technology has replaced that process. I also wonder how effective it is at separating different breeds of the same type of fish. (If I remember there were many different "breeds" of salmon, t

  • overfishing (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dankelley ( 573611 )
    Historically, improvements in fishing efficiencies have gone hand-in-hand with fisheries depletion. Better methods just kill more fish. It is difficult to be sanguine about technological improvements; policy changes are more promising.

    The simple summary of recent fisheries history is that we are destroying stock after stock, around the world. For more on this, I recommend a Nature paper by my colleague Ransom Myers, entitled "Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities" [Nature 2003, vol

  • This HAS been done by us. They are late. The proposed method will not work, it is to arbitrary, low tech and yealds a sucsess percentage on about 70% Pall Fagraberg Marine Tech www.marine-tech.fo

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