IFE-net: improved feature enhancement network for weak feature target recognition in autonomous underwater vehicles

Abstract The recognizing underwater targets is a crucial component of autonomous underwater vehicle patrols and detection efforts. In the process of visual image recognition in real underwater environment, the spatial and semantic features of the target often appear to different degrees of loss, and the scarcity of specific types of underwater samples leads to unbalanced data on categories. This kind of problem makes the target features appear weak and seriously affects the accuracy of underwater target recognition. Traditional deep learning methods based on data and feature enhancement cannot achieve ideal recognition effect. Based on the above difficulties, this paper proposes an improved feature enhancement network for weak feature target recognition. Firstly, a multi-scale spatial and semantic feature enhancement module is constructed to extract the feature information of the extraction target accurately. Secondly, this paper solves the influence of target feature distortion on classification through multi-scale feature comparison of positive and negative samples. Finally, the Rank & Sort Loss function was used to train the depth target detection to solve the problem of recognition accuracy under highly unbalanced sample data. Experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of the proposed method is 2.28% and 3.84% higher than that of the existing algorithms in the recognition of underwater fuzzy and distorted target images, which demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.