Towards Fish Individuality-Based Aquaculture

By bringing concepts of precision farming to intensive aquaculture fish production, it can be optimized to be more sustainable while focusing on fish welfare criteria. This requires a shift from mass to smart production and to consider each fish as an individual. Therefore, it is required to be able to identify each fish in a tank or sea cage. In this article, we prove the feasibility of fish identification using the iris as a biometric characteristic. Based on a new dataset, captured in a controlled out of water environment: 1) a fully automated iris recognition system is presented and utilized for the experiments and 2) the distinctiveness and the stability of the iris pattern of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is assessed. Results prove the distinctiveness, which indicates that the iris pattern of Atlantic salmon is suited for biometric identification. However, the iris pattern has a low stability, which means it changes over time. Due to frequent interaction of fish and system, usually multiple times a day during feeding, there is ample opportunity to keep the biometric template up-to-date, which makes the lack of long-term stability a nonissue. It can be concluded that a biometric fish identification system is feasible, with the precondition that biometric templates of each fish are periodically updated to combat the low stability.