A Novel Lightweight Algorithm for Sonar Image Recognition

Sonar images possess characteristics such as low resolution, high noise, and blurred edges. Utilizing CNNs would lead to problems such as inadequate target recognition accuracy. Moreover, due to their larger sizes and higher computational requirements, existing CNNs face deployment issues in embedded devices. Therefore, we propose a sonar image recognition algorithm optimized for the lightweight algorithm, MobileViT, by analyzing the features of sonar images. Firstly, the MobileViT block is modified by adding and redesigning the jump connection layer to capture more important features of sonar images. Secondly, the original 1 × 1 convolution is replaced with the redesigned multi-scale convolution Res2Net in the MV2 module to enhance the ability of the algorithm to learn global and local features. Finally, the IB loss is applied to address the imbalance of sample categories in the sonar dataset, assigning different weights to the samples to improve the performance of the network. The experimental results show that several proposed improvements have improved the accuracy of sonar image recognition to varying degrees. At the same time, the proposed algorithm is lightweight and can be deploy on embedded devices.