Convolutional neural network based object detection in a fish ladder : Positional and class imbalance problems using YOLOv3

Abstract: Hydropower plants create blockages in fish migration routes. Fish ladders can serve as alternative routes but are complex to install and follow up to help adapt and develop them further. In this study, computer vision tools are considered in this regard. More specifically, object detection is applied to images collected in a hydropower plant fish ladder to localise and classify wild, farmed and unknown fish labelled according to the presence, absence or uncertainty of an adipose fin. Fish migration patterns are not deterministic, making it a challenge to collect representative and balanced data to train a model that is resilient to changing conditions. In this study, two data imbalances are addressed by modifying a YOLOv3 baseline model: foreground-foreground class imbalance is targeted using hard and soft resampling and positional imbalance using translation augmentation. YOLOv3 is a convolutional neural network predicting bounding box coordinates, class probabilities and confidence scores simultaneously. It divides images into grids and makes predictions based on grid cell locations and anchor box offsets. Performance is estimated across 10 random data splits and different bounding box overlap thresholds, using (mean) average precision as well as recall, precision and F1 score estimated at optimal validation set confidence thresholds. The Wilcoxon signed-ranks test is used for determining statistical significance. In experiments, the best performance was observed on wild and farmed fish, with F1 scores reaching 94.8 and 89.0 percent respectively. The inconsistent appearance of unknown fish appears harder to generalise to, with a corresponding F1 score of 65.7 percent. Soft sampling but especially translation augmentation contributed to enhanced performance and reduced variance, implying that the baseline model is particularly sensitive to positional imbalance. Spatial dependencies introduced by YOLOv3’s grid cell strategy likely produce local bias or overfitting. An experimental evaluation highlight the importance of not relying on a single data split when evaluating performance on a moderately large or custom dataset. A key challenge observed in experiments is the choice of a suitable confidence threshold, influencing the dynamics of the results.