Machine learning based optimized sea vessel location detection to identify illegal fishing

Abstract

Illegal fishing is a pervasive and destructive global issue that poses a significant threat to maritime ecosystems and the resilience of fisheries. Illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing leads to the extinction of the fishing population. Many researchers have presented various approaches to detect illegal fishing, for example, using sensors, image recognition, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but each one has some limitations. Our research aims to compare different vessel gear types to select the best vessel container that can be easily monitored and less prone to illegal activities. To achieve this, our research proposed an optimization method that involves hyperparameter selection using a genetic algorithm instead of a grid search. Using the crossover method of the genetic algorithm our model is compatible with larger datasets and unknown search space which is not possible in the baseline algorithm i.e. grid search. Moreover, after applying the genetic hyperparameter optimization technique, the overall accuracy, recall, and F1 score is increased for all vessel types significantly. While comparing our optimized model with the existing model with different evaluation metrics, our model’s performance is outstanding.