An FPGA-Based System for Video Processing to Detect Holes in Aquaculture Nets

Aquaculture faces the issue of net integrity on cage farming. Holes on the net need to be detected but as yet the process is not fully automated. This work is a second-generation embedded system to detect in real time holes in aquaculture nets from a video input. It extends previous results by processing video rather than still images, under lighting variation, haze, and different size of holes along each frame. The modeling and simulation of the new algorithm has been done in MATLAB; the system has been designed and implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) - based platform. The proposed system has substantially better performance vs. software at a much lower energy consumption.