Live Fish Species Classification in Underwater Images by Using Convolutional Neural Networks Based on Incremental Learning with Knowledge Distillation Loss

Nowadays, underwater video systems are largely used by marine ecologists to study the biodiversity in underwater environments. These systems are non-destructive, do not perturb the environment and generate a large amount of visual data usable at any time. However, automatic video analysis requires efficient techniques of image processing due to the poor quality of underwater images and the challenging underwater environment. In this paper, we address live reef fish species classification in an unconstrained underwater environment. We propose using a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and training this network by using a new strategy based on incremental learning. This training strategy consists of training the CNN progressively by focusing at first on learning the difficult species well and then gradually learning the new species incrementally using knowledge distillation loss while keeping the high performances of the old species already learned. The proposed approach yields an accuracy of 81.83% on the LifeClef 2015 Fish benchmark dataset.