Fish-Finder: A robust small target detection method for aquaculture fish in low-quality underwater images

Underwater fish object detection serves as a pivotal research direction in marine biology, aquaculture management, and computer vision, yet it poses substantial challenges due to the complexity of underwater environments, occultations, and the small-sized and frequently moving fish in aquaculture. Addressing these challenges, we propose a novel underwater fish object detection algorithm named Fish-Finder. First, we engendered a structure titled "C2fBF," utilizing the dual-path routing attention protocol of BiFormer. The primary objective of this structure is to alleviate the perturbations induced by underwater intricacies during the phase of downsampling in the backbone network, thereby discerning and conserving finer contextual features. Subsequently, we co-opted the RepGFPN method within our neck network-a distinctive approach that adeptly merges high-level semantic constructs with low-level spatial specifics, thus fortifying its multi-scale detection prowess. Then, in an endeavor to diminish the sensitivity toward positional aberrations during the detection of diminutive aquatic creatures, we incorporated a novel bounding box regression loss function, the Wasserstein loss, to the existing CIoU. This innovative function gauges the congruity between the predicted bounding box Gaussian distribution and the reference bounding box Gaussian distribution. Finally, in regard to the dataset, we independently assembled a specific dataset termed "SmallFish." This unique dataset, meticulously designed for the detection of small-scale fish within intricate underwater settings, includes 5000 annotated images of small fish. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art detection methods, our proposed method improves the accuracy by $$ and $$ , and mean average precision (mAP) increases $$ and $$ in public dataset Kaggle-Fish and our SmallFish dataset, respectively.