Underwater Trash Detection Algorithm for Low-resolution Small Targets
Underwater trash detection is considered a key technology for underwater robots to handle underwater trash.However,the complexity and variability of the underwater environment,poor lighting conditions,the loss of detailed information,and the poor performance of low-resolution images due to step-length convolution in traditional CNN(convolutional neural networks)models limit the accuracy and speed of existing models.In order to solve these problems,a novel underwater rubbish detection algorithm namedSPDC-YOLOv8(small proposal detection convolution-YOLOv8)was proposed.The algorithm employed an adaptive spatial decomposition-based CNN module SPD-Conv(space-to-depth convolution)in the backbone network of YOLOv8,replacing the step-length convolu-tion,thus improving the accuracy of the model for low-resolution images and small object detection.Meanwhile,the CARAFE(content-aware reassembly of features)was employed in the up-sampling process of the model,which enhanced the semantic information and feature representation of underwater rubbish,thus improving the robustness of object detection.The experimental results demonstrate that the method proposed achieves 98.6%and 91.2%accuracy on the trash_ICRA19 dataset and TrashCan dataset,respectively,and improves by 0.3%and 0.8%compared to the original YOLOv8 model,with a the computation time is 2.6 ms in both cases.The im-proved YOLOv8 algorithm proposed is found to be more adaptable to the complex underwater environment.