An interactive AI-driven platform for fish age reading

Abstract

Fish age is an important biological variable required as part of routine stock assessment and analysis of fish population dynamics. Age estimates are traditionally obtained by human experts from the count of ring-like patterns along calcified structures such as otoliths. To automate the process and minimize human bias, modern methods have been designed utilizing the advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). While many AI-based methods have been shown to attain satisfactory accuracy, there are concerns regarding the lack of explainability of some early implementations. Consequently, new explainable AI-based approaches based on U-Net and Mask R-CNN have been recently published having direct compatibility with traditional ring counting procedures. Here we further extend this endeavor by creating an interactive website housing these explainable AI methods allowing age readers to be directly involved in the AI training and development. An important aspect of the platform presented in this article is that it allows the additional use of different advanced concepts of Machine Learning (ML) such as transfer learning, ensemble learning and continual learning, which are all shown to be effective in this study.