SPECIES IDENTIFICATION FOR AQUATIC BIOMONITORING USING DEEP RESIDUAL CNN AND TRANSFER LEARNING

Abstract

Aquatic insects and other benthic macroinvertebrates are mostly used as bioindicators of the ecological status of freshwaters. However, an expensive and time-consuming process of species identification represents one of the key obstacles for reliable biomonitoring of aquatic ecosystems. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning (DL) based method for species identification that we evaluated on several available public datasets (FIN-Benthic, STONEFLY9, and EPT29) along with our Chironomidae dataset (CHIRO10). The proposed method relies on three DL techniques used to improve robustness when training is done on a relatively small dataset: transfer learning, data augmentation, and feature dropout. We applied transfer learning by employing ResNet-50 deep convolutional neural network (CNN) pretrained on ImageNet 2012 dataset. The results show significant improvement compared to original contributions and confirms that there is a considerable gain when there are multiple images per specimen.