Feasibility Research on Fish Pose Estimation Based on Rotating Box Object Detection

A video-based method to quantify animal posture movement is a powerful way to analyze animal behavior. Both humans and fish can judge the physiological state through the skeleton framework. However, it is challenging for farmers to judge the breeding state in the complex underwater environment. Therefore, images can be transmitted by the underwater camera and monitored by a computer vision model. However, it lacks datasets in artificial intelligence and is unable to train deep neural networks. The main contributions of this paper include: (1) the world’s first fish posture database is established. 10 key points of each fish are manually marked. The fish flock images were taken in the experimental tank and 1000 single fish images were separated from the fish flock. (2) A two-stage attitude estimation model is used to detect fish key points. The evaluation of the algorithm performance indicates the precision of detection reaches 90.61%, F1-score reaches 90%, and Fps also reaches 23.26. We made a preliminary exploration on the pose estimation of fish and provided a feasible idea for fish pose estimation.