Detection and counting method of juvenile abalones based on improved SSD network

Detection and counting of abalones is one of key technologies of abalones breeding density estimation. The abalones in the breeding stage are small in size, densely distributed, and occluded between individuals, so the existing object detection algorithms have low precision for detecting the abalones in the breeding stage. To solve this problem, a detection and counting method of juvenile abalones based on improved SSD network is proposed in this research. The innovation points of this method are: Firstly, the multi-layer feature dynamic fusion method is proposed to obtain more color and texture information and improve detection precision of juvenile abalones with small size; secondly, the multiscale attention feature extraction method is proposed to highlight shape and edge feature information of juvenile abalones and increase detection precision of juvenile abalones with dense distribution and individual coverage; finally, the loss feedback training method is used to increase the diversity of data and the pixels of juvenile abalones in the images to get the even higher detection precision of juvenile abalones with small size. The experimental results show that the AP@0.5 value, AP@0.7 value and AP@0.75 value of the detection results of the proposed method are 91.14%, 89.90% and 80.14%, respectively. The precision and recall rates of the counting results are 99.59% and 97.74%, respectively, which are superior to the counting results of SSD, FSSD, MutualGuide, EfficientDet and VarifocalNet models. The proposed method can provide support for real-time monitoring of aquaculture density for juvenile abalones. (c) 2023 China Agricultural University. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).