AquaFeat: A Features-Based Image Enhancement Model for Underwater Object Detection

TL;DR

AquaFeat is a task-driven feature enhancement module integrated with object detection models to improve underwater object detection accuracy while maintaining real-time processing speed.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, plug-and-play, multi-scale feature enhancement network trained end-to-end with the detector, optimized specifically for underwater object detection tasks.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art precision and recall on underwater datasets.

Maintains real-time processing speed of 46.5 FPS.

Provides a practical, task-specific enhancement for underwater imaging applications.

Abstract

The severe image degradation in underwater environments impairs object detection models, as traditional image enhancement methods are often not optimized for such downstream tasks. To address this, we propose AquaFeat, a novel, plug-and-play module that performs task-driven feature enhancement. Our approach integrates a multi-scale feature enhancement network trained end-to-end with the detector's loss function, ensuring the enhancement process is explicitly guided to refine features most relevant to the detection task. When integrated with YOLOv8m on challenging underwater datasets, AquaFeat achieves state-of-the-art Precision (0.877) and Recall (0.624), along with competitive mAP scores (mAP@0.5 of 0.677 and mAP@[0.5:0.95] of 0.421). By delivering these accuracy gains while maintaining a practical processing speed of 46.5 FPS, our model provides an effective and computationally efficient solution for real-world applications, such as marine ecosystem monitoring and infrastructure inspection.