PE-Transformer: Path enhanced transformer for improving underwater object detection

Traditional object detection methods cannot effectively identify underwater objects with complex backgrounds, and it is difficult to fully obtain the details of small-scale underwater targets, resulting in poor detection performance. We propose a path-augmented Transformer detection framework to address these limitations to explore the semantic details of small-scale underwater targets in complex environments. On one hand, an embedded local path detection information scheme is devised to facilitate the interaction between high-level and low-level features, thereby enhancing the semantic representation of distinctive features of small-scale underwater targets. Rich dependency relationships are established between the acquired high-level and low-level features within the CSWin-Transformer framework, thus fortifying the semantic representation during the encoding phase. Furthermore, a individualized loss function is employed to optimize and fine-tune features at various hierarchical levels. On the other hand, a detection module with flexible and adaptive point representation that is different from conventional square detection methods is designed. This module covers the underwater target from any direction, and the salient point samples in classification localization and feature selection between points realize the feature selection improves the detection accuracy of underwater objects simultaneously. We designed a new weighted loss function to encourage the network to converge better. Experimental results on open-source underwater and remote sensing images of UTDAC, RUOD, and ADios show that the proposed method outperforms other underwater object detection methods in terms of precision(P), recall(R), comprehensive evaluation index of F1-score and FPS(frames per second).