Robust features extraction from shape signature for fish images classification

Recently, the process of fish species classification has become one of the most challenging problems addressed by researchers. In this work, a robust scheme to classify fish images based on robust feature extraction from shape signatures is proposed. First, the image contour is fitted using one of the common approaches named radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) fitting to obtain image centroid. Afterward, prominent features from the shape signature are extracted. These features are representative of fish shapes because they can distinguish the characteristics of each class as well as being relatively robust to scale and rotation changes. Finally, for the classification process purpose, RBFNN is used again for image classification against one of the most commonly used classification techniques called support vector machine (SVM). The proposed paradigm has been applied to a standard fish dataset acquired from a live video dataset grouped into twenty-three clusters representing specific fish species. The resulting accuracy based on SVM and RBFNN was 90.41% and 98.04%, respectively