MECT-MobileViT: A Lightweight Fish Weight Prediction Model Based on Dual-View Morphological Feature Fusion and...

In intensive aquaculture, non-invasive real-time monitoring of morphological traits and body weight of largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) is essential for precision feeding and yield estimation. Manual measurement is laborious and stressful, whereas vision-based methods are challenged by insufficient dual-view feature fusion, poor robustness to underwater noise, and over-parameterized models unsuitable for edge deployment. To address these issues, a lightweight framework, MECT-MobileViT, is proposed based on MobileViT-xxs. A Morphometric-Guided Multi-Scale Fusion module is designed to couple physical priors with dual-branch visual features, strengthening shape-weight association. An ECA-NL attention block employing instance normalization, GLU gating, and threshold filtering is embedded to enhance feature robustness against visual disturbances typical in aquaculture and to accentuate critical morphological features. A three-stage synergistic pruning strategy-attention head pruning, structured channel pruning, and depthwise separable attention substitution-is applied to achieve substantial compression while preserving representational capacity. Experiments on a self-built lateral-dorsal dual-view dataset show that the proposed model significantly outperforms mainstream benchmarks. The pruned version attains an R² of 0.8266 and an RMSE of 16.4201, with less than 2% accuracy degradation relative to the best unpruned model, and contains only 7.34 M parameters. This study demonstrates a promising prototype for contactless, stress-free weight estimation in largemouth bass and offers new technical insights into feature fusion, noise suppression, and collaborative model compression for aquaculture visual perception.