Automatic Feeding Control for Dense Aquaculture Fish Tanks

This paper introduces an efficient visual signal processing system to continuously control the feeding process of fish in aquaculture tanks. The aim is to improve the production profit in fish farms by controlling the amount of feed at an optimal rate. The automatic feeding control includes two components: 1) a continuous decision on whether the fish are actively consuming feed, and 2) automatic detection of the number of excess feed populated on the water surface of the tank using a two-stage approach. The amount of feed is initially detected using the correlation filer applied to an optimum local region within the video frame, and then followed by a SVM-based refinement classifier to suppress the falsely detected feed. Having both measures allows us to accurately control the feeding process in an automated manner. Experimental results show that our system can accurately and efficiently estimate both measures.