Robust time-frequency model estimation in otolith images for fish age and growth analysis

We present a robust method for time-frequency model estimation. It involves a robust Leclerc´s estimator to ensure robustness w.r.t. noise and interferences present in time- frequency representations. This scheme is applied to fish age and growth analysis from otolith images. This application involves the estimation of the parameters of a priori fish growth models using this robust time-frequency analysis. We present a quantitative experimental validation over a large set of real images of Plaice otoliths.