A Novel Underwater Image Enhancement and Improved Underwater Biological Detection Pipeline

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new underwater image enhancement and object detection pipeline that combines CBAM-augmented YOLOv5 with a self-adaptive histogram algorithm, significantly improving detection accuracy in complex underwater environments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel feature extraction method with CBAM in YOLOv5 and a SAGHS image enhancement technique, advancing underwater biological detection capabilities.

Findings

Enhanced detection accuracy on URPC2021 dataset

Improved image quality with SAGHS

Training data significantly impacts performance

Abstract

For aquaculture resource evaluation and ecological environment monitoring, automatic detection and identification of marine organisms is critical. However, due to the low quality of underwater images and the characteristics of underwater biological, a lack of abundant features may impede traditional hand-designed feature extraction approaches or CNN-based object detection algorithms, particularly in complex underwater environment. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to perform object detection in the underwater environment. This paper proposed a novel method for capturing feature information, which adds the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to the YOLOv5 backbone. The interference of underwater creature characteristics on object characteristics is decreased, and the output of the backbone network to object information is enhanced. In addition, the self-adaptive global histogram stretching algorithm (SAGHS) is designed to eliminate the degradation problems such as low contrast and color loss caused by underwater environmental information to better restore image quality. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluation on the URPC2021 benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptivity of our methods. Beyond that, this paper conducts an exhaustive analysis of the role of training data on performance.