A Simple Deformable Model for Shark Recognition

The great white shark is a large marine animal that is a potential threat to swimmers. There were many shark attack reports worldwide and many of the attacks happened in shallow waters. One way to reduce the incidence of shark attacks is to employ shark patrols. This is done by flying a light plane along the coast and the shark spotting is done by humans. The aim of this research is to automate this process. Gururatsakul [2] proposed a technique to recognize sharks from dolphins and shark-like objects in top-view aerial images by focusing on shape feature characteristics. This work proposes an alternate way of distinguishing sharks from dolphins and shark-like objects by considering two-dimensional deformable models. A deformable model is represented by variables and two reference tables. These variables are optimized (deforming the model to best fit a test object) by iteratively adjusting their values to reduce the error output from the objective function. The classification of sharks from dolphins and shark-like objects is based on the best matching model. A high result of 93% on identifying sharks, dolphins, and shark-like objects has been achieved by the proposed method.