Extraction Method of Scallop Areas Using Shelly Rim Features Considering Bottom Sediment of Sand

The results of fishery investigations are used to estimate the catch size, times fish are caught, and future stocks in the fish culture industry. In Tokoro, Japan, scallop farms for fisheries are found on gravel and sand seabeds. The seabed images are used for fishery investigations, which are absolutely necessary to visually estimate the amount of scallops. However, there is no automatic technology to measure the quantities of resources, and so the current investigation technique is the manual measurement by experts. This paper describes our method to extract scallop areas from fine sand seabed images from the sand field. The photography environments have a high degree of noise including large differences in lighting. In the sand field, we can see only the shelly rim because the scallop is covered with sand and opens and closes its shell while it is alive and breathing. We propose a method to categorize the bottom sediment of the seabed image and extract the shelly rim areas under varying illumination, extract the scallop areas using the shelly rims by using professional knowledge in the sand field, presents the results, and evaluate the method’s effectiveness.