Instance Segmentation of Shrimp Based on Contrastive Learning

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 13; no. 12; p. 6979
• Main Authors: Zhou, Heng, Kim, Sung Hoon, Kim, Sang Cheol, Kim, Cheol Won, Kang, Seung Won, Kim, Hyongsuk
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.06.2023
• Subjects: AI applications; Analysis; Aquaculture; Aquaculture industry; Automation; Computer vision; Datasets; Deep learning; Epidemics; Innovations; instance segmentation; Machine vision; New technology; Seafood; Seafood industry; Segmentation; Shellfish farming; shrimp farming; Shrimps; Teaching methods; Unsupervised learning; South Korea
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/app13126979

Shrimp farming has traditionally served as a crucial source of seafood and revenue for coastal countries. However, with the rapid development of society, conventional small-scale manual shrimp farming can no longer meet the increasing demand for rapid growth. As a result, it is imperative to continuously develop automation technology for efficient large-scale shrimp farming. Smart shrimp farming represents an innovative application of advanced technologies and management practices in shrimp aquaculture to expand the scale of production. Nonetheless, the use of these new technologies is not without difficulties, including the scarcity of public datasets and the high cost of labeling. In this paper, we focus on the application of advanced computer vision techniques to shrimp farming. To achieve this objective, we first establish a high-quality shrimp dataset for training various deep learning models. Subsequently, we propose a method that combines unsupervised learning with downstream instance segmentation tasks to mitigate reliance on large training datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that the method involving contrastive learning outperforms the direct fine-tuning of an instance segmentation model for shrimp in instance segmentation tasks. Furthermore, the concepts presented in this paper can extend to other fields that utilize computer vision technologies.