A lightweight object detection framework for underwater imagery with joint image restoration and color transformation

Traditional underwater detectors struggle to match the demands of visual observation and icon detection because of the underwater optical pictures' color distortion, uneven illumination, and excessive noise levels. In this paper, a lightweight deep-water object detection network is proposed, which consists of three key components, namely image restoration, color transformation, and object detection. First, we propose a lightweight attention module for the problems of color distortion and uneven illumination in underwater images. This module pays more attention to the areas with a greater influence of underwater color when dealing with different types of poor-quality images. Second, to reduce the computational complexity of object detection, we propose a color conversion module based on the laplacian pyramid decomposition. This module incorporates multi-scale features to effectively address the loss of details in the brightest or darkest regions. Finally, we propose a multi-scale dense residual object detection network. The network applies a multi-scale kernel to an improved residual module to realize the extraction and fusion of feature information of multiple receptive fields. Furthermore, to deal with the problem of underwater small-sample object detection, we propose a mutually exclusive loss function. The mutual exclusion loss promotes the update of network parameters so that the classes with different characteristics of samples generated by the network are mutually exclusive. We ran tests on the Pycharm platform to show that the suggested lightweight joint underwater object identification algorithm outperformed the most sophisticated ones. The proposed system was put to the test in an intricate underwater setting, achieving 92.56 percent accuracy and 19.2 frames per second