ECOPAMPA: A new tool for automatic fish schools detection and assessment from echo data

Accurate identification of aquatic organisms and their numerical abundance calculation using echo detection techniques remains a great challenge for marine researchers. A software architecture for echo data processing is presented in this article. Within it, it is discussed how to obtain energetic, morphometric and bathymetric fish school descriptors to accurately identify different fish-species. To accomplish this task it was necessary to have a development platform that allowed reading echo data from a particular echosounder, to detect fish aggregations and then to calculate fish school descriptors that would be used for fish-species identification, in an automatic way. This article also describes thoroughly the digital processing algorithms for this automatic detection and classification, as well as the automatic process required for surface and bottom line detection, which is necessary to determine the exploration range. These algorithms are implemented within the ECOPAMPA software, which is the first Argentinean system for marine species identification. Finally, a comparative result over experimental data of ECOPAMPA against Echoview Software Pty Ltd (formerly Myriax Software Pty Ltd), is carefully examined.