Fish sonar image recognition algorithm based on improved YOLOv5

Fish stock assessment is crucial for sustainable marine fisheries management in rangeland ecosystems. To address the challenges posed by the overfishing of offshore fish species and facilitate comprehensive deep-sea resource evaluation, this paper introduces an improved fish sonar image detection algorithm based on the you only look once algorithm, version 5 (YOLOv5). Sonar image noise often results in blurred targets and indistinct features, thereby reducing the precision of object detection. Thus, a C3N module is incorporated into the neck component, where depth-separable convolution and an inverse bottleneck layer structure are integrated to lessen feature information loss during downsampling and forward propagation. Furthermore, lowercase shallow feature layer is introduced in the network prediction layer to enhance feature extraction for pixels larger than $ 4 \times 4 $. Additionally, normalized weighted distance based on a Gaussian distribution is combined with Intersection over Union (IoU) during gradient descent to improve small target detection and mitigate the IoU's scale sensitivity. Finally, traditional non-maximum suppression (NMS) is replaced with soft-NMS, reducing missed detections due to occlusion and overlapping fish targets that are common in sonar datasets. Experiments show that the improved model surpasses the original model and YOLOv3 with gains in precision, recall and mean average precision of 2.3%, 4.7% and 2.7%, respectively, and 2.5%, 6.3% and 6.7%, respectively. These findings confirm the method's effectiveness in raising sonar image detection accuracy, which is consistent with model comparisons. Given Unmanned Underwater Vehicle advancements, this method holds the potential to support fish culture decision-making and facilitate fish stock resource assessment.