The present disclosure provides a method and system architectures for carrying out the method of automated marine life object classification and identification utilising a core of a Deep Neural Network, DNN, to facilitate the operations of a post-processing module subnetwork such as instance segmentation, masking, labelling, and image overlay of an input image determined to contain one or more target marine life objects. Multiple instances of target objects from the same image data can be easily classified and labelled for post-processing through application of a masking layer over each respective object by a semantic segmentation network.