Enhanced CenterTrack for Robust Underwater Multi-Fish Tracking

Accurate monitoring of fish movement is essential for understanding behavioral patterns and group dynamics in aquaculture systems. Underwater scenes-characterized by dense populations, frequent occlusions, non-rigid body motion, and visually similar appearances-present substantial challenges for conventional multi-object tracking methods. We propose an improved CenterTrack-based framework tailored for multi-fish tracking in such environments. The framework integrates three complementary components: a multi-branch feature extractor that enhances discrimination among visually similar individuals, occlusion-aware output heads that estimate visibility states, and a three-stage cascade association module that improves trajectory continuity under abrupt motion and occlusions. To support systematic evaluation, we introduce a self-built dataset named Multi-Fish 25 (MF25), continuous video sequences of 75 individually annotated fish recorded in aquaculture tanks. The experimental results on MF25 show that the proposed method achieves an IDF1 of 82.5%, MOTA of 85.8%, and IDP of 84.7%. Although this study focuses on tracking performance rather than biological analysis, the produced high-quality trajectories form a solid basis for subsequent behavioral studies. The framework's modular design and computational efficiency make it suitable for practical, online tracking in aquaculture scenarios.