Learning Visual Representation of Underwater Acoustic Imagery Using Transformer-Based Style Transfer Method

TL;DR

This paper introduces a transformer-based style transfer framework to enhance underwater acoustic imagery recognition by generating high-quality pseudo-acoustic samples from optical images, aiding data augmentation and domain transfer.

Contribution

It proposes a novel transformer-based style transfer method to generate pseudo-acoustic images from optical datasets, improving underwater acoustic target recognition performance.

Findings

Generated high-fidelity pseudo-acoustic samples

Enhanced underwater acoustic target recognition accuracy

Supported domain transfer between optical and acoustic images

Abstract

Underwater automatic target recognition (UATR) has been a challenging research topic in ocean engineering. Although deep learning brings opportunities for target recognition on land and in the air, underwater target recognition techniques based on deep learning have lagged due to sensor performance and the size of trainable data. This letter proposed a framework for learning the visual representation of underwater acoustic imageries, which takes a transformer-based style transfer model as the main body. It could replace the low-level texture features of optical images with the visual features of underwater acoustic imageries while preserving their raw high-level semantic content. The proposed framework could fully use the rich optical image dataset to generate a pseudo-acoustic image dataset and use it as the initial sample to train the underwater acoustic target recognition model. The experiments select the dual-frequency identification sonar (DIDSON) as the underwater acoustic data source and also take fish, the most common marine creature, as the research subject. Experimental results show that the proposed method could generate high-quality and high-fidelity pseudo-acoustic samples, achieve the purpose of acoustic data enhancement and provide support for the underwater acoustic-optical images domain transfer research.