About the project

This project is led by Dr Karsten Heia, Nofima Seafood Industry

Operational welfare indicators (OWIs) are important tools for monitoring the health and well-being of farmed Atlantic salmon. They help fish farmers detect injury, disease, parasites, and stress, and are central to both animal welfare and sustainable value creation in aquaculture.

Today, many welfare assessments rely on manual observations. These can be time-consuming, costly, and difficult to standardize across farms and operators. They may also fail to identify welfare problems until they have already become serious.

AIMSWel addresses this challenge by developing automated imaging-based methods that can detect welfare issues earlier and more objectively. The project focuses on multispectral imaging, a technology that captures information from several selected light wavelengths. This makes it possible to detect chemical and physical changes in fish tissue that are not visible in conventional RGB images.

The approach builds on earlier work with hyperspectral imaging, which has shown promise for detecting bleeding, wounds, and minor skin damage in salmon under ex-situ conditions. AIMSWel will transfer this knowledge to the in-situ environment by developing an underwater multispectral imaging system that can assess fish welfare while the fish are swimming freely. This has the potential to improve welfare monitoring without handling, removing, or euthanizing fish.

Objectives

The main objective of the project is to develop new tools using underwater multispectral imaging to assess and document operational welfare indicators in Atlantic salmon in aquaculture.

The project’s operative objectives are to:

• evaluate hyperspectral image analysis for quantifying welfare indicators at an early stage
• identify key spectral bands for welfare assessment and compare hyperspectral and multispectral performance
• design an underwater multispectral imaging system for welfare assessment
• test the system under controlled laboratory conditions
• test the system in situ in a sea cage with freely swimming fish

Project participants

NMBU participant

Other participants

Dr Karsten Heia, Nofima, project leader

Dr Samuel Ortega, Nofima, WP leder
Dr Rowan Romeyn, Nofima, WP leder
Dr Hongbo Liu, Nofima, WP leder
Dr Linda Tschirren, Nofima
Dr Evan Durland, Nofima