Underwater 3D measurement based on improved YOLOv8n and laser scanning imaging device

The wide range of optical planes in underwater laser imaging results in the presence of a large number of noisy light bars in the background region. Since the shape and intensity of these noisy light bars are very similar to the target information, it is difficult to detect and eliminate them accurately. In this paper, a deep learning algorithm named YOLOv8-FWR is proposed, which can effectively improve the efficiency and quality of underwater laser imaging by combining with laser scanning imaging equipment. First, we introduce a novel pooling module called Focal_SPPF to mitigate the impact of background noise. Second, we propose a weighted feature Concat module to enhance the detection of small target light bars located at the object’s edges. Finally, to enhance the model’s adaptability for underwater deployment, we optimized the C2f module through structural reparameterization techniques. This approach effectively reduced the model’s parameter count while enhancing its accuracy. We constructed a dataset containing a large amount of background noise by simulating the process of underwater laser scanning imaging and evaluated the effectiveness of the augmented model through ablation and comparison experiments. The experimental results indicate that our model outperforms the YOLOv8n by obtaining an 8.6% improvement on mAP50–95 and reducing the parameter count by 37%. A favorable balance between detection accuracy and number of parameters is achieved. Meanwhile, experiments on VOC2012 and the Underwater Detection Dataset (UDD) verify its good generalizability. Finally, we built a rotating line laser scanning imaging system and validated its effectiveness through underwater laser scanning experiments.