Enhanced Water Surface Object Detection with Dynamic Task-Aligned Sample Assignment and Attention Mechanisms

The detection of objects on water surfaces is a pivotal technology for the perceptual systems of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). This paper proposes a novel real-time target detection system designed to address the challenges posed by indistinct bottom boundaries and foggy imagery. Our method enhances the YOLOv8s model by incorporating the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) and a self-attention mechanism, examining their impact at various integration points. A dynamic sample assignment strategy was introduced to enhance the precision of our model and accelerate its convergence. To address the challenge of delineating bottom boundaries with clarity, our model employs a two-strategy approach: a threshold filter and a feedforward neural network (FFN) that provides targeted guidance for refining these boundaries. Our model demonstrated exceptional performance, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 47.1% on the water surface object dataset, which represents a 1.7% increase over the baseline YOLOv8 model. The dynamic sample assignment strategy contributes a 1.0% improvement on average precision at the intersection over union (IoU) threshold of 0.5 (AP^0.5), while the FFN strategy fine-tunes the bottom boundaries and achieves an additional 0.8% improvement in average precision at IoU threshold of 0.75 (AP^0.75). Furthermore, ablation studies have validated the versatility of our approach, confirming its potential for integration into various detection frameworks.