Monitoring fish weight using pulse-echo waveform metrics

Fish anatomical vertical dimensions are extracted from a time-of-flight analysis of fish echo shape using narrow-bandwidth echosounding of swimming individuals. These vertical dimensions fit a Gumbel distribution model and are successfully correlated with fish weight. The proposed method can be used to estimate the mean weight of fish in aquaculture cages as an alternative to target strength measurements. Full-waveform acquisition and signal correlation techniques permitted to increase the signal-to-noise ratio and to improve the performance against traditional envelope-based echosounding.