AquaYOLO: Advanced YOLO-based fish detection for optimized aquaculture pond monitoring

Abstract Aquaculture plays an important role in ensuring global food security, supporting economic growth, and protecting natural resources. However, traditional methods of monitoring aquatic environments are time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this, there is growing interest in using com...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: M. Vijayalakshmi, A. Sasithradevi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2025-02-01
Series:Scientific Reports
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-89611-y
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1849724178520866816
author M. Vijayalakshmi
A. Sasithradevi
author_facet M. Vijayalakshmi
A. Sasithradevi
author_sort M. Vijayalakshmi
collection DOAJ
description Abstract Aquaculture plays an important role in ensuring global food security, supporting economic growth, and protecting natural resources. However, traditional methods of monitoring aquatic environments are time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this, there is growing interest in using computer vision for more efficient aqua monitoring. Fish detection is a key challenging step in these vision-based systems, as it faces challenges such as changing light conditions, varying water clarity, different types of vegetation, and dynamic backgrounds. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new model called AquaYOLO, an optimized model specifically designed for aquaculture applications. The backbone of AquaYOLO employs CSP layers and enhanced convolutional operations to extract hierarchical features. The head enhances feature representation through upsampling, concatenation, and multi-scale fusion. The detection head uses a precise 40 × 40 scale for box regression and dropping the final C2f layer to ensure accurate localization. To test the AquaYOLO model, we utilize DePondFi dataset (Detection of Pond Fish) collected from aquaponds in South India. DePondFi dataset contains around 50k bounding box annotations across 8150 images. Proposed AquaYOLO model performs well, achieving a precision, recall and mAP@50 of 0.889, 0.848, and 0.909 respectively. Our model ensures efficient and affordable fish detection for small-scale aquaculture.
format Article
id doaj-art-cb664cd1d2924446a3936bb36dcad592
institution DOAJ
issn 2045-2322
language English
publishDate 2025-02-01
publisher Nature Portfolio
record_format Article
series Scientific Reports
spelling doaj-art-cb664cd1d2924446a3936bb36dcad5922025-08-20T03:10:49ZengNature PortfolioScientific Reports2045-23222025-02-0115111210.1038/s41598-025-89611-yAquaYOLO: Advanced YOLO-based fish detection for optimized aquaculture pond monitoringM. Vijayalakshmi0A. Sasithradevi1School of Electronics Engineering, Vellore Institute of TechnologyCenter for Advanced Data Science, Vellore Institute of TechnologyAbstract Aquaculture plays an important role in ensuring global food security, supporting economic growth, and protecting natural resources. However, traditional methods of monitoring aquatic environments are time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this, there is growing interest in using computer vision for more efficient aqua monitoring. Fish detection is a key challenging step in these vision-based systems, as it faces challenges such as changing light conditions, varying water clarity, different types of vegetation, and dynamic backgrounds. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new model called AquaYOLO, an optimized model specifically designed for aquaculture applications. The backbone of AquaYOLO employs CSP layers and enhanced convolutional operations to extract hierarchical features. The head enhances feature representation through upsampling, concatenation, and multi-scale fusion. The detection head uses a precise 40 × 40 scale for box regression and dropping the final C2f layer to ensure accurate localization. To test the AquaYOLO model, we utilize DePondFi dataset (Detection of Pond Fish) collected from aquaponds in South India. DePondFi dataset contains around 50k bounding box annotations across 8150 images. Proposed AquaYOLO model performs well, achieving a precision, recall and mAP@50 of 0.889, 0.848, and 0.909 respectively. Our model ensures efficient and affordable fish detection for small-scale aquaculture.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-89611-yFish DetectionHierarchical featuresAquaculture MonitoringDeep LearningYOLO
spellingShingle M. Vijayalakshmi
A. Sasithradevi
AquaYOLO: Advanced YOLO-based fish detection for optimized aquaculture pond monitoring
Scientific Reports
Fish Detection
Hierarchical features
Aquaculture Monitoring
Deep Learning
YOLO
title AquaYOLO: Advanced YOLO-based fish detection for optimized aquaculture pond monitoring
title_full AquaYOLO: Advanced YOLO-based fish detection for optimized aquaculture pond monitoring
title_fullStr AquaYOLO: Advanced YOLO-based fish detection for optimized aquaculture pond monitoring
title_full_unstemmed AquaYOLO: Advanced YOLO-based fish detection for optimized aquaculture pond monitoring
title_short AquaYOLO: Advanced YOLO-based fish detection for optimized aquaculture pond monitoring
title_sort aquayolo advanced yolo based fish detection for optimized aquaculture pond monitoring
topic Fish Detection
Hierarchical features
Aquaculture Monitoring
Deep Learning
YOLO
url https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-89611-y
work_keys_str_mv AT mvijayalakshmi aquayoloadvancedyolobasedfishdetectionforoptimizedaquaculturepondmonitoring
AT asasithradevi aquayoloadvancedyolobasedfishdetectionforoptimizedaquaculturepondmonitoring