Underwater image object detection based on multi-scale feature fusion

Underwater object detection and classification technology is one of the most important ways for humans to explore the oceans. However, existing methods are still insufficient in terms of accuracy and speed, and have poor detection performance for small objects such as fish. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale aggregation enhanced (MAE-FPN) object detection method based on the feature pyramid network, including the multi-scale convolutional calibration module (MCCM) and the feature calibration distribution module (FCDM). First, we design the MCCM module, which can adaptively extract feature information from objects at different scales. Then, we built the FCDM structure to make the multi-scale information fusion more appropriate and to alleviate the problem of missing features from small objects. Finally, we construct the Fish Segmentation and Detection (FSD) dataset by fusing multiple data augmentation methods, which enriches the data resources for underwater object detection and solves the problem of limited training resources for deep learning. We conduct experiments on FSD and public datasets, and the results show that the proposed MAE-FPN network significantly improves the detection performance of underwater objects, especially small objects.