Self-Supervised Pre-Training Joint Framework: Assisting Lightweight Detection Network for Underwater Object Detection

In the computer vision field, underwater object detection has been a challenging task. Due to the attenuation of light in a medium and the scattering of light by suspended particles in water, underwater optical images often face the problems of color distortion and target feature blurring, which greatly affect the detection accuracy of underwater object detection. Although deep learning-based algorithms have achieved state-of-the-art results in the field of object detection, most of them cannot be applied to practice because of the limited computing capacity of a low-power processor embedded in unmanned underwater vehicles. This paper proposes a lightweight underwater object detection network based on the YOLOX model called LUO-YOLOX. A novel weighted ghost-CSPDarknet and simplified PANet were used in LUO-YOLOX to reduce the parameters of the whole model. Moreover, aiming to solve the problems of color distortion and unclear features of targets in underwater images, this paper proposes an efficient self-supervised pre-training joint framework based on underwater auto-encoder transformation (UAET). After the end-to-end pre-training process with the self-supervised pre-training joint framework, the backbone of the object detection network can extract more essential and robust features from degradation images when retrained on underwater datasets. Numerous experiments on the URPC2021 and detecting underwater objects (DUO) datasets verify the performance of our proposed method. Our work can assist unmanned underwater vehicles to perform underwater object detection tasks more accurately.