Underwater object detection in sonar imagery with detection transformer and Zero-shot neural architecture search

TL;DR

This paper introduces NAS-DETR, a novel neural architecture search optimized detection transformer for underwater sonar image object detection, achieving state-of-the-art results with real-time efficiency and enhanced interpretability.

Contribution

It is the first to combine DETR with NAS for sonar image detection, optimizing architecture for low-resolution sonar data.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on benchmark datasets.

Maintains real-time processing with minimal computational overhead.

Enhances interpretability through correlation analysis of key parameters.

Abstract

Underwater object detection using sonar imagery has become a critical and rapidly evolving research domain within marine technology. However, sonar images are characterized by lower resolution and sparser features compared to optical images, which seriously degrades the performance of object detection.To address these challenges, we specifically propose a Detection Transformer (DETR) architecture optimized with a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach called NAS-DETR for object detection in sonar images. First, an improved Zero-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method based on the maximum entropy principle is proposed to identify a real-time, high-representational-capacity CNN-Transformer backbone for sonar image detection. This method enables the efficient discovery of high-performance network architectures with low computational and time overhead. Subsequently, the backbone is combined with a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and a deformable attention-based Transformer decoder to construct a complete network architecture. This architecture integrates various advanced components and training schemes to enhance overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on two Representative datasets, while maintaining minimal overhead in real-time efficiency and computational complexity. Furthermore, correlation analysis between the key parameters and differential entropy-based fitness function is performed to enhance the interpretability of the proposed framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the field of sonar object detection to integrate the DETR architecture with a NAS search mechanism.