Development and implementation of a fish counter by using an embedded system

Abstract The development and implementation of an instrument for the automatic counting of ornamental fish by using an embedded system, is introduced herein. The proposed instrument is tested with two marine species, the Guppies (Poecilia Reticulata) and Mollies (Poecilia Sphenops), under conditions of controlled lighting and specimens whose sizes vary from 0.5 to 2.3 cm. The counting is done by digital image processing obtaining an average accuracy up to 96.64% using different species of fishes and different sizes. The main contributions are the theoretical and experimental study to determine the aquarium background color and the algorithm of the proposed method implemented in a low cost and high performance embedded system, specifically in a Raspberry Pi 2 executing the free GNU Octave Scientific Programming Language, thus, allowing the counting instrument to be reliable, portable and easily migratory to different operating systems. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive with state-of-the-art ones.