A Comparative Analysis Of Resnet Models On Fish Classification

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2026

School

Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Abstract

Fish identification and classification tasks allow scientists greater data on the sustainability and diversity of fisheries. Advances in computer vision, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have enabled automated fish detection at scale; however, increased model depth may not justify the additional time and computational cost. This study examines the ResNet family of models for binary fish identification to assess whether deeper networks provide meaningful performance advantages over simpler configurations. We compare ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ResNet-101, and ResNet-152 using both non-pretrained and pretrained initializations. We introduce an Energy-Weighted Score (EWS) to enable comparison of computational resource usage using cost-based weighting. A reliable fish versus no-fish classification can be achieved with as few as 18 layers, yielding 99.975% accuracy which improved to 100% accuracy following threshold optimization. For binary fish identification, increasing ResNet depth provides increased EWS scores with little impact on accuracy returns over shallower models. Overall, models with fewer layers outperformed deeper models with more parameters, and additional depth and tuning techniques were unable to outperform simpler configurations while delivering higher EWS scores.

Publication Title

Mathematics

Volume

14

Issue

6

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