Segmentation and density statistics of mariculture cages from remote sensing images using mask R-CNN

Abstract The normal growth of fishes is closely relevant to the density of mariculture. It is of great significance to accurately calculate the breeding area of specific sea area from satellite remote sensing images. However, there are no reports about cage segmentation and density detection based on remote sensing images so far. And the accurate segmentation of cages faces challenges from very large high-resolution images. Firstly, a new public mariculture cage data set is built. Secondly, the training set is augmented via sample variations to improve the robustness of the model. Then, for cage segmentation and density statistics, a new methodology based on Mask R-CNN is proposed. Using dividing and stitching technologies, the entire remote sensing test images of the cage can be accurately segmented. Finally, using the trained model, the object detection features and segmentation characteristics can be obtained at the same time. Considering only the area within the target detection frame, the proposed method can count the pixels in the segmented area, which can obtain accurate area and density while reducing time-consuming. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with traditional contour extraction method and U-Net based scheme, the proposed scheme can significantly improve segmentation precision and model’s robustness. The relative error of the actual area is only 1.3%.