An Underwater Target Detection Algorithm Based on Attention Mechanism and Improved YOLOv7

For underwater robots in the process of performing target detection tasks,the color distortion and the uneven quality of underwater images lead to great difficulties in the feature extraction process of the model,which is prone to issues like error detection,omission detection,and poor accuracy.Therefore,this paper proposed the CER-YOLOv7(CBAM-EIOU-RepVGG-YOLOv7)underwater target detection algorithm.To improve the algorithm’s capability to retain valid features from both spatial and channel perspectives during the feature extraction phase,we have added a Convolutional Block Attention Module(CBAM)to the backbone network.The Reparameterization Visual Geometry Group(RepVGG)module is inserted into the backbone to improve the training and inference capabilities.The Efficient Intersection over Union(EIoU)loss is also used as the localization loss function,which reduces the error detection rate and missed detection rate of the algorithm.The experimental results of the CER-YOLOv7 algorithm on the UPRC(Underwater Robot Prototype Competition)dataset show that the mAP(mean Average Precision)score of the algorithm is 86.1%,which is a 2.2%improvement compared to the YOLOv7.The feasibility and validity of the CER-YOLOv7 are proved through ablation and comparison experiments,and it is more suitable for underwater target detection.

Underwater four-quadrant dual-beam circumferential scanning laser fuze using nonlinear adaptive backscatter filter based on pauseable SAF-LMS algorithm

The phenomenon of a target echo peak overlapping with the backscattered echo peak significantly undermines the detection range and precision of underwater laser fuzes.To overcome this issue,we propose a four-quadrant dual-beam circumferential scanning laser fuze to distinguish various interference signals and provide more real-time data for the backscatter filtering algorithm.This enhances the algorithm loading capability of the fuze.In order to address the problem of insufficient filtering capacity in existing linear backscatter filtering algorithms,we develop a nonlinear backscattering adaptive filter based on the spline adaptive filter least mean square(SAF-LMS)algorithm.We also designed an algorithm pause module to retain the original trend of the target echo peak,improving the time discrimination accuracy and anti-interference capability of the fuze.Finally,experiments are conducted with varying signal-to-noise ratios of the original underwater target echo signals.The experimental results show that the average signal-to-noise ratio before and after filtering can be improved by more than31 d B,with an increase of up to 76%in extreme detection distance.

Simulation Analysis and Experimental Study of Defect Detection Underwater by ACFM Probe

This article studies the application of the alternating current field measurement （ACFM） method in defect detection for underwater structures. Numerical model of the ACFM system is built for structure surface defect detection in seawater environment. Finite element simulation is performed to investigate rules and characteristics of the electromagnetic signal distribution in the defected area. In respect of the simulation results, underwater artificial crack detection experiments are designed and conducted for the ACFM system. The experiment results show that the ACFM system can detect cracks in underwater structures and the detection accuracy is higher than 85%. This can meet the engineering requirement of underwater structure defect detection. The results in this article can be applied to establish technical foundation for the optimization and development of ACFM based underwater structure defects detection system.

Research of Underwater Bottom Object and Reverberation in Feature Space

The critical technical problem of underwater bottom object detection is founding a stable feature space for echo signals classification. The past literatures more focus on the characteristics of object echoes in feature space and reverberation is only treated as interference. In this paper, reverberation is considered as a kind of signal with steady characteristic, and the clustering of reverberation in frequency discrete wavelet transform （FDWT） feature space is studied. In order to extract the identifying information of echo signals, feature compression and cluster analysis are adopted in this paper, and the criterion of separability between object echoes and reverberation is given. The experimental data processing results show that reverberation has steady pattern in FDWT feature space which differs from that of object echoes. It is proven that there is separability between reverberation and object echoes.

Classification of Underwater Target Echoes Based on Auditory Perception Characteristics

In underwater target detection, the bottom reverberation has some of the same properties as the target echo, which has a great impact on the performance. It is essential to study the difference between target echo and reverberation. In this paper, based on the unique advantage of human listening ability on objects distinction, the Gammatone filter is taken as the auditory model. In addition, time-frequency perception features and auditory spectral features are extracted for active sonar target echo and bottom reverberation separation. The features of the experimental data have good concentration characteristics in the same class and have a large amount of differences between different classes, which shows that this method can effectively distinguish between the target echo and reverberation.

Morphological Research on Geometrical Scattering Waves of an Underwater Target

In this paper, a new method based on morphologic research named reconstruction cross-component removal （RCCR） is developed to analyze geometrical scattering waves of an underwater target. Combining the origin of the cross-component in Wigner-ViUe distribution, the highlight model of target echoes and time-frequency features of linear frequency-modulated signal can remove cross-components produced by multiple component signals in Wigner-Ville distribution and recover the auto-components of output signals. This method is used in experimental data processing, which can strengthen the real geometric highlights, and restrain the cross components. It is demonstrated that this method is helpful to analyze the geometrical scattering waves, providing an effective solution to underwater target detection and recognition.

Line spectrum detection algorithm based on the phase feature of target radiated noise

In order to improve the performance of line spectrum detection,according to the feature that the underwater target radiated noise containing stable line spectrum,the differences of the phase difference between line spectrum and background noise,a weighted line spectrum detection algorithm based on the phase variance is proposed in frequency domain.After phase difference alignment,the phase variance of line spectrum and the phase of background noise,respectively,are small and big in frequency domain,this method utilizes the weighted statistical algorithm to cumulate the frequency spectrum based on the phase variance,which can restrain the background noise disturbance,and enhance the signal to noise ratio（SNR）.The theory analysis and experimental results both verify that the proposed method can well enhance the energy of line spectrum,restrain the energy of background noise,and have better detection performance under lower SNR.

Design of motion control system of pipeline detection AUV

A great number of pipelines in China are in unsatisfactory condition and faced with problems of corrosion and cracking,but there are very few approaches for underwater pipeline detection.Pipeline detection autonomous underwater vehicle(PDAUV) is hereby designed to solve these problems when working with advanced optical,acoustical and electrical sensors for underwater pipeline detection.PDAUV is a test bed that not only examines the logical rationality of the program,effectiveness of the hardware architecture,accuracy of the software interface protocol as well as the reliability and stability of the control system but also verifies the effectiveness of the control system in tank experiments and sea trials.The motion control system of PDAUV,including both the hardware and software architectures,is introduced in this work.The software module and information flow of the motion control system of PDAUV and a novel neural network-based control(NNC) are also covered.Besides,a real-time identification method based on neural network is used to realize system identification.The tank experiments and sea trials are carried out to verify the feasibility and capability of PDAUV control system to complete underwater pipeline detection task.

Underwater object detection by fusing features from different representations of sonar data

Modern underwater object detection methods recognize objects from sonar data based on their geometric shapes.However,the distortion of objects during data acquisition and representation is seldom considered.In this paper,we present a detailed summary of representations for sonar data and a concrete analysis of the geometric characteristics of different data representations.Based on this,a feature fusion framework is proposed to fully use the intensity features extracted from the polar image representation and the geometric features learned from the point cloud representation of sonar data.Three feature fusion strategies are presented to investigate the impact of feature fusion on different components of the detection pipeline.In addition,the fusion strategies can be easily integrated into other detectors,such as the You Only Look Once(YOLO)series.The effectiveness of our proposed framework and feature fusion strategies is demonstrated on a public sonar dataset captured in real-world underwater environments.Experimental results show that our method benefits both the region proposal and the object classification modules in the detectors.

SIMO detection schemes for underwater optical wireless communication under turbulence

In underwater optical wireless communication(UOWC),a channel is characterized by abundant scattering/absorption effects and optical turbulence.Most previous studies on UOWC have been limited to scattering/absorption effects.However,experiments in the literature indicate that underwater optical turbulence(UOT)can cause severe degradation of UOWC performance.In this paper,we characterize an UOWC channel with both scattering/absorption and UOT taken into consideration,and a spatial diversity receiver scheme,say a singleinput–multiple-output(SIMO) scheme,based on a light-emitting-diode(LED) source and multiple detectors is proposed to mitigate deep fading.The Monte Carlo based statistical simulation method is introduced to evaluate the bit-error-rate performance of the system.It is shown that spatial diversity can effectively reduce channel fading and remarkably extend communication range.

An echo detection algorithm for underwater continuous wave active detection

The model of linear frequency modulation continuous wave （LFMCW） applied in underwater detection and the method for the detection of echo signal and the estimation of target parameters were studied. By analyzing the heterodyne signal, an algorithm with the structure of heterodyne-Practional Fourier Transform （FRFT） was proposed. To reduce the computation of searching targets in a two-dimensional FRFT result, the heterodyne signal would be processed by FRFT at a specific order, after Radon-Ambiguity Transform （RAT） was applied to estimate the sweep rate of the signal. Simulations proved that the algorithm can eliminate the coupling phenomenon of distance and velocity of LFMCW, and estimate targets＇ parameters accurately. The lake trial results showed that the processing gain of LFMCW processed by the algorithm in this paper was 13 dB better than that of the LFM processed by matched filter. The research results indicated that the algorithm applied in LFMCW underwater detection was feasible and effective, and it could estimate targets＇ parameters accurately and obtain a good detection performance.

Dolphin Vocal Sound Generation via Deep WaveGAN

The marine biological sonar system evolved in the struggle of nature is far superior to the current artificial sonar. Therefore, the development of bionic underwater concealed detection is of great strategic significance to the military and economy. In this paper, a generative adversarial network(GAN) is trained based on the dolphin vocal sound dataset we constructed, which can achieve unsupervised generation of dolphin vocal sounds with global consistency. Through the analysis of the generated audio samples and the real audio samples in the time domain and the frequency domain, it can be proven that the generated audio samples are close to the real audio samples,which meets the requirements of bionic underwater concealed detection.

Analytical review and study on object detection techniques in the image

Object detection is the most fundamental but challenging issues in the field of computer vision.Object detection identifies the presence of various individual objects in an image.Great success is attained for object detection/recognition problems in the controlled environment,but still,the problem remains unsolved in the uncontrolled places,particularly,when the objects are placed in arbitrary poses in an occluded and cluttered environment.In the last few years,a lots of efforts are made by researchers to resolve this issue,because of its wide range of applications in computer vision tasks,like content-enabled image retrieval,event or activity recognition,scene understanding,and so on.This review provides a detailed survey of 50 research papers presenting the object detection techniques,like machine learning-based techniques,gradient-based techniques,Fast Region-based Convolutional Neural Network(Fast R-CNN)detector,and the foreground-based techniques.Here,the machine learning-based approaches are classified into deep learning-based approaches,random forest,Support Vector Machine(SVM),and so on.Moreover,the challenges faced by the existing techniques are explained in the gaps and issues section.The analysis based on the classification,toolset,datasets utilized,published year,and the performance metrics are discussed.The future dimension of the research is based on the gaps and issues identified from the existing research works.

Signal waveform design to detect an underwater high-speed small target

The problem of sonar signal waveform design to detect a high-speed small target in an underwater environment is discussed. From theoretical analysis, time-frequency hop signal is regarded as the most suitable signal waveform in this application. To get precise target parameter estimation ability, the signal should have high range-Doppler resolution performance. The results of signal analysis show that hop signal with frequency serial coding as Costas array has sharp ambiguity characteristic, so it can be used in an active sonar system to detect a high speed small target. A scheme of frequency coding is also presented.