Underwater Target Recognition Based on Improved YOLOv4 Neural Network

Abstract

The YOLOv4 neural network is employed for underwater target recognition. To improve the accuracy and speed of recognition, the structure of YOLOv4 is modified by replacing the upsampling module with a deconvolution module and by incorporating depthwise separable convolution into the network. Moreover, the training set used in the YOLO network is preprocessed by using a modified mosaic augmentation, in which the gray world algorithm is used to derive two images when performing mosaic augmentation. The recognition results and the comparison with the other target detectors demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed YOLOv4 structure and the method of data preprocessing. According to both subjective and objective evaluation, the proposed target recognition strategy can effectively improve the accuracy and speed of underwater target recognition and reduce the requirement of hardware performance as well.