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Identifying and counting fish are crucial for managing stocking, harvesting, and marketing of farmed fish. Researchers have used convolutional networks for these tasks and explored various approaches to enhance network learning. Batch normalization is one technique that improves network stability and accuracy. This study aimed to evaluate machine learning for identifying and counting pirapitinga Piaractus brachypomus fry with different batch sizes. The researchers used one thousand photographic images of Pirapitinga fingerlings, labeled with bounding boxes. They trained the adapted convolutional network model with batch normalization layers added at the end of each convolution block. They set the training to one hundred and fifty epochs and tested batch sizes of 5, 10, and 20. Furthermore, they measured network performance using precision, recall, and mAP@0.5. Models with smaller batch sizes performed less effectively. The training with a batch size of 20 achieved the best performance, with a precision of 96.74%, recall of 95.48%, mAP@0.5 of 97.08%, and accuracy of 98%. This indicates that larger batch sizes improve accuracy in detecting and counting pirapitinga fry across different fish densities.

Aquaculture produces more than 122 million tons of fish globally. Among the several economically important species are the Serrasalmidae, which are valued for their nutritional and sensory characteristics. To meet the growing demand, there is a need for automation and accuracy of processes, at a lower cost. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a viable alternative for automation, reducing human intervention, work time, errors, and production costs. Therefore, the objective of this work is to evaluate the efficacy of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in counting round fish fingerlings (Serrasalmidae) at different densities using 390 color photographs in an illuminated environment. The photographs were submitted to two convolutional neural networks for object detection: one model was adapted from a pre-trained CNN and the other was an online platform based on AutoML. The metrics used for performance evaluation were precision (P), recall (R), accuracy (A), and F1-Score. In conclusion, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are effective tools for detecting and counting fish. The pre-trained CNN demonstrated outstanding performance in identifying fish fingerlings, achieving accuracy, precision, and recall rates of 99% or higher, regardless of fish density. On the other hand, the AutoML exhibited reduced accuracy and recall rates as the number of fish increased.