A fishy story

Regular readers familiar with my proclivity for puns will guess that the title of this post refers to an aquatic machine vision application, and they’d be right too!

From the Basler “Success Stories” folder comes the tail (tale… get it?) of a fish recognition system. But with apologies to AVT, this is not about telling the difference between a pike and a guppy, it’s much more challenging than that. What the researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland wanted to do was recognize individual sturgeon.

The solution came in two parts. First they backlight the fish and get a whole body silhouette, the area of which can be extrapolated to an estimate of the fish’s mass. Then they acquire a high resolution image of the sturgeons head. Apparently every sturgeon has slightly different features, so it’s possible to tell one from the other.

No word yet on whether they can tell which are the virgin sturgeon.