A Review of Computer Vision Technologies for Fish Tracking

Fish tracking based on computer vision is a complex and challenging task in fishery production and ecological studies. Most of the applications of fish tracking use classic filtering algorithms, which lack in accuracy and efficiency. To solve this issue, deep learning methods utilized deep neural networks to extract the features, which achieve a good performance in the fish tracking. Some one-stage detection algorithms have gradually been adopted in this area for the real-time applications. The transfer learning to fish target is the current development direction. At present, fish tracking technology is not enough to cover actual application requirements. According to the literature data collected by us, there has not been any extensive review about vision-based fish tracking in the community. In this paper, we introduced the development and application prospects of fish tracking technology in last ten years. Firstly, we introduced the open source datasets of fish, and summarized the preprocessing technologies of underwater images. Secondly, we analyzed the detection and tracking algorithms for fish, and sorted out some transferable frontier tracking model. Thirdly, we listed the actual applications, metrics and bottlenecks of the fish tracking such as occlusion and multi-scale. Finally, we give the discussion for fish tracking datasets, solutions of the bottlenecks, and improvements. We expect that our work can help the fish tracking models to achieve higher accuracy and robustness.