DeepFishNET+: A Dual-Stream Deep Learning Framework for Robust Underwater Fish Detection and Classification

The conservation and protection of fish species are crucial tasks for aquaculture and marine biology. Recognizing fish in underwater environments is highly challenging due to poor lighting and the visual similarity between fish and the background. Conventional recognition methods are extremely time-consuming and often yield unsatisfactory accuracy. This paper proposes a new method called DeepFishNET+. First, an Underwater Image Enhancement module was implemented for image correction. Second, Global CNN Stream (RestNet50) and a Local Transformer Stream were implemented to generate the Feature Map and Feature Vector. Next, a feature fusion operation was performed in the Cross-Attention Feature Fusion module. Finally, Yolov8 was used for fish detection and localization. Softmax was applied for species recognition. This new approach achieved a classification precision of 98.28% and a detection precision of 92.74%.