Multi-scale ResNet for real-time underwater object detection

An automatic underwater object recognition system is essential to reduce the costs of underwater inspection. In this study, we propose a novel convolutional neural network architecture that is trained on underwater video frames. This method is based on a modified residual neural network (ResNet) for underwater object detection. Multi-scale ResNet (M-ResNet), the modified method, improves efficiency by utilizing multi-scale operations for the accurate detection of objects of various sizes, especially small objects. The experimental results show that the proposed method yields an accuracy of 96.5% (mAP) in recognition performance. As a consequence, we propose a novel system for automatic object detection as an application for marine environments.