Unsupervised Multi-Expert Learning Model for Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater image enhancement aims to restore a clean appearance and thus improves the quality of underwater degraded images.Current methods feed the whole image directly into the model for enhancement.However,they ignored that the R,G and B channels of underwater degraded images present varied degrees of degradation,due to the selective absorption for the light.To address this issue,we propose an unsupervised multi-expert learning model by considering the enhancement of each color channel.Specifically,an unsupervised architecture based on generative adversarial network is employed to alleviate the need for paired underwater images.Based on this,we design a generator,including a multi-expert encoder,a feature fusion module and a feature fusion-guided decoder,to generate the clear underwater image.Accordingly,a multi-expert discriminator is proposed to verify the authenticity of the R,G and B channels,respectively.In addition,content perceptual loss and edge loss are introduced into the loss function to further improve the content and details of the enhanced images.Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves more pleasing results in vision quality.Various metrics(PSNR,SSIM,UIQM and UCIQE) evaluated on our enhanced images have been improved obviously.

A Novel Multi-Stream Fusion Network for Underwater Image Enhancement

Due to the selective absorption of light and the existence of a large number of floating media in sea water, underwater images often suffer from color casts and detail blurs. It is therefore necessary to perform color correction and detail restoration. However,the existing enhancement algorithms cannot achieve the desired results. In order to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a multi-stream feature fusion network. First, an underwater image is preprocessed to obtain potential information from the illumination stream, color stream and structure stream by histogram equalization with contrast limitation, gamma correction and white balance, respectively. Next, these three streams and the original raw stream are sent to the residual blocks to extract the features. The features will be subsequently fused. It can enhance feature representation in underwater images. In the meantime, a composite loss function including three terms is used to ensure the quality of the enhanced image from the three aspects of color balance, structure preservation and image smoothness. Therefore, the enhanced image is more in line with human visual perception.Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparison experiments with many stateof-the-art underwater image enhancement algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides superior results over them in terms of MSE,PSNR, SSIM, UIQM and UCIQE, and the enhanced images are more similar to their ground truth images.

Novel method for identifying the stages of discharge underwater based on impedance change characteristic

It is difficult to determine the discharge stages in a fixed time of repetitive discharge underwater due to the arc formation process being susceptible to external environmental influences. This paper proposes a novel underwater discharge stage identification method based on the Strong Tracking Filter(STF) and impedance change characteristics. The time-varying equivalent circuit model of the discharge underwater is established based on the plasma theory analysis of the impedance change characteristics and mechanism of the discharge process. The STF is used to reduce the randomness of the impedance of repeated discharges underwater, and then the universal identification resistance data is obtained. Based on the resistance variation characteristics of the discriminating resistance of the pre-breakdown, main, and oscillatory discharge stages, the threshold values for determining the discharge stage are obtained. These include the threshold values for the resistance variation rate(K) and the moment(t).Experimental and error analysis results demonstrate the efficacy of this innovative method in discharge stage determination, with a maximum mean square deviation of Scrless than 1.761.

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 Image Classification Based on EfficientnetB0 and Two-Hidden-Layer Random Vector Functional Link

The ocean plays an important role in maintaining the equilibrium of Earth’s ecology and providing humans access to a wealth of resources.To obtain a high-precision underwater image classification model,we propose a classification model that combines an EfficientnetB0 neural network and a two-hidden-layer random vector functional link network(EfficientnetB0-TRVFL).The features of underwater images were extracted using the EfficientnetB0 neural network pretrained via ImageNet,and a new fully connected layer was trained on the underwater image dataset using the transfer learning method.Transfer learning ensures the initial performance of the network and helps in the development of a high-precision classification model.Subsequently,a TRVFL was proposed to improve the classification property of the model.Net construction of the two hidden layers exhibited a high accuracy when the same hidden layer nodes were used.The parameters of the second hidden layer were obtained using a novel calculation method,which reduced the outcome error to improve the performance instability caused by the random generation of parameters of RVFL.Finally,the TRVFL classifier was used to classify features and obtain classification results.The proposed EfficientnetB0-TRVFL classification model achieved 87.28%,74.06%,and 99.59%accuracy on the MLC2008,MLC2009,and Fish-gres datasets,respectively.The best convolutional neural networks and existing methods were stacked up through box plots and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests,respectively.The increases imply improved systematization properties in underwater image classification tasks.The image classification model offers important performance advantages and better stability compared with existing methods.

Single Photon Detection Technology in Underwater Wireless Optical Communication:Modulation Modes and Error Correction Coding Analysis

This study explores the application of single photon detection(SPD)technology in underwater wireless optical communication(UWOC)and analyzes the influence of different modulation modes and error correction coding types on communication performance.The study investigates the impact of on-off keying(OOK)and 2-pulse-position modulation(2-PPM)on the bit error rate(BER)in single-channel intensity and polarization multiplexing.Furthermore,it compares the error correction performance of low-density parity check(LDPC)and Reed-Solomon(RS)codes across different error correction coding types.The effects of unscattered photon ratio and depolarization ratio on BER are also verified.Finally,a UWOC system based on SPD is constructed,achieving 14.58 Mbps with polarization OOK multiplexing modulation and 4.37 Mbps with polarization 2-PPM multiplexing modulation using LDPC code error correction.

Improving path planning efficiency for underwater gravity-aided navigation based on a new depth sorting fast search algorithm

This study focuses on the improvement of path planning efficiency for underwater gravity-aided navigation.Firstly,a Depth Sorting Fast Search(DSFS)algorithm was proposed to improve the planning speed of the Quick Rapidly-exploring Random Trees*(Q-RRT*)algorithm.A cost inequality relationship between an ancestor and its descendants was derived,and the ancestors were filtered accordingly.Secondly,the underwater gravity-aided navigation path planning system was designed based on the DSFS algorithm,taking into account the fitness,safety,and asymptotic optimality of the routes,according to the gravity suitability distribution of the navigation space.Finally,experimental comparisons of the computing performance of the ChooseParent procedure,the Rewire procedure,and the combination of the two procedures for Q-RRT*and DSFS were conducted under the same planning environment and parameter conditions,respectively.The results showed that the computational efficiency of the DSFS algorithm was improved by about 1.2 times compared with the Q-RRT*algorithm while ensuring correct computational results.

Adaptive Sensor-Fault Tolerant Control of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles With Input Saturation

This paper investigates the tracking control problem for unmanned underwater vehicles(UUVs)systems with sensor faults,input saturation,and external disturbance caused by waves and ocean currents.An active sensor fault-tolerant control scheme is proposed.First,the developed method only requires the inertia matrix of the UUV,without other dynamic information,and can handle both additive and multiplicative sensor faults.Subsequently,an adaptive fault-tolerant controller is designed to achieve asymptotic tracking control of the UUV by employing robust integral of the sign of error feedback method.It is shown that the effect of sensor faults is online estimated and compensated by an adaptive estimator.With the proposed controller,the tracking error and estimation error can asymptotically converge to zero.Finally,simulation results are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A Novel CCA-NMF Whitening Method for Practical Machine Learning Based Underwater Direction of Arrival Estimation

Underwater direction of arrival(DOA)estimation has always been a very challenging theoretical and practical problem.Due to the serious non-stationary,non-linear,and non-Gaussian characteristics,machine learning based DOA estimation methods trained on simulated Gaussian noised array data cannot be directly applied to actual underwater DOA estimation tasks.In order to deal with this problem,environmental data with no target echoes can be employed to analyze the non-Gaussian components.Then,the obtained information about non-Gaussian components can be used to whiten the array data.Based on these considerations,a novel practical sonar array whitening method was proposed.Specifically,based on a weak assumption that the non-Gaussian components in adjacent patches with and without target echoes are almost the same,canonical cor-relation analysis(CCA)and non-negative matrix factorization(NMF)techniques are employed for whitening the array data.With the whitened array data,machine learning based DOA estimation models trained on simulated Gaussian noised datasets can be used to perform underwater DOA estimation tasks.Experimental results illustrated that,using actual underwater datasets for testing with known machine learning based DOA estimation models,accurate and robust DOA estimation performance can be achieved by using the proposed whitening method in different underwater con-ditions.

Research Progress of Underwater Soundabsorbing Material

This article provides an overview of underwater sound-absorbing materials mainly applied with polyurethane matrix.It mainly elaborates on the underwater sound mecha-nism,commonly used underwater sound-absorbing materials and structures,as well as new underwater sound-absorbing material structures derived from local resonance pho-nonic crystals,such as phononic crystals,local resonance phonon wood piles,and meta-material sound-absorbing structures.This provides a broader development space and direction for the future development of underwater sound-absorbing materials.

Sagging damage characteristics of hull girder with trapezoidal cross-section subjected to near-field underwater explosion

To investigate the overall damage characteristics and failure modes of a warship subjected to an underwater non-contact near-field explosion,a hull girder with a trapezoidal cross-section was designed,manufactured,and tested.The design criteria and parameters were determined according to the similarity criterion.Dynamic responses of the girder freely floating on water were obtained under varying conditions,including stand-off distance,charge mass,and position of attack.Damage morphologies of the girder model were obtained.Based on our analysis,basic conditions for sagging damage of the hull girder are proposed.The aim of this study was to determine an efficient method of attack resulting in the most severe damage to the ship hull.The experimental results show that the girder mainly exhibits a first-order response when the first wet frequency of the girder is close to the frequency of the explosion bubble pulsation.The largest deformation was observed when the underwater explosion occurred directly below the midspan of the girder compared to other explosions of the same intensity at different attack positions.When the ratio of stand-off to maximum bubble radius(λ)satisfies 0.7≤λ<2,the bubble mainly causes sagging damage instead of hogging.Asλdecreases(1≤λ<2),the sagging damage increases under the same charge mass.However,asλdecreases further(0.7≤λ<1),the sagging deformation decreases.This is likely due to the impact of the liquid jet formed by the collapsing bubble,which causes the girder deformation to shift from sagging back to hogging deformation.The initial shock wave excites the high-frequency response of the girder structure but contributes very little to the overall velocity and displacement.However,bubble pulsation typically causes a low-frequency response,which will affect the velocity and displacement of the girder.The low-pressure region of the flow field formed by bubble pulsation and resonant coupling between the girder and the bubble are the predominant causes of damage to the overall girder structure.

UnderwaterWaste Recognition and Localization Based on Improved YOLOv5

With the continuous development of the economy and society,plastic pollution in rivers,lakes,oceans,and other bodies of water is increasingly severe,posing a serious challenge to underwater ecosystems.Effective cleaning up of underwater litter by robots relies on accurately identifying and locating the plastic waste.However,it often causes significant challenges such as noise interference,low contrast,and blurred textures in underwater optical images.A weighted fusion-based algorithm for enhancing the quality of underwater images is proposed,which combines weighted logarithmic transformations,adaptive gamma correction,improved multi-scale Retinex(MSR)algorithm,and the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization(CLAHE)algorithm.The proposed algorithm improves brightness,contrast,and color recovery and enhances detail features resulting in better overall image quality.A network framework is proposed in this article based on the YOLOv5 model.MobileViT is used as the backbone of the network framework,detection layer is added to improve the detection capability for small targets,self-attention and mixed-attention modules are introduced to enhance the recognition capability of important features.The cross stage partial(CSP)structure is employed in the spatial pyramid pooling(SPP)section to enrich feature information,and the complete intersection over union(CIOU)loss is replaced with the focal efficient intersection over union(EIOU)loss to accelerate convergence while improving regression accuracy.Experimental results proved that the target recognition algorithm achieved a recognition accuracy of 0.913 and ensured a recognition speed of 45.56 fps/s.Subsequently,Using red,green,blue and depth(RGB-D)camera to construct a system for identifying and locating underwater plastic waste.Experiments were conducted underwater for recognition,localization,and error analysis.The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for identifying and locating underwater plastic waste,and it has good localization accuracy.

UGC-YOLO:Underwater Environment Object Detection Based on YOLO with a Global Context Block

With the continuous development and utilization of marine resources,the underwater target detection has gradually become a popular research topic in the field of underwater robot operations and target detection.However,it is difficult to combine the environmental semantic information and the semantic information of targets at different scales by detection algorithms due to the complex underwater environment.In this paper,a cascade model based on the UGC-YOLO network structure with high detection accuracy is proposed.The YOLOv3 convolutional neural network is employed as the baseline structure.By fusing the global semantic information between two residual stages in the parallel structure of the feature extraction network,the perception of underwater targets is improved and the detection rate of hard-to-detect underwater objects is raised.Furthermore,the deformable convolution is applied to capture longrange semantic dependencies and PPM pooling is introduced in the highest layer network for aggregating semantic information.Finally,a multi-scale weighted fusion approach is presented for learning semantic information at different scales.Experiments are conducted on an underwater test dataset and the results have demonstrated that our proposed algorithm could detect aquatic targets in complex degraded underwater images.Compared with the baseline network algorithm,the Common Objects in Context(COCO)evaluation metric has been improved by 4.34%.

A Review and Analysis of Localization Techniques in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years,there has been a rapid growth in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks(UWSNs).The focus of research in this area is now on solving the problems associated with large-scale UWSN.One of the major issues in such a network is the localization of underwater nodes.Localization is required for tracking objects and detecting the target.It is also considered tagging of data where sensed contents are not found of any use without localization.This is useless for application until the position of sensed content is confirmed.This article’s major goal is to review and analyze underwater node localization to solve the localization issues in UWSN.The present paper describes various existing localization schemes and broadly categorizes these schemes as Centralized and Distributed localization schemes underwater.Also,a detailed subdivision of these localization schemes is given.Further,these localization schemes are compared from different perspectives.The detailed analysis of these schemes in terms of certain performance metrics has been discussed in this paper.At the end,the paper addresses several future directions for potential research in improving localization problems of UWSN.

Real-time localization for underwater equipment using an extremely low frequency electric field

A new real-time underwater equipment location method adopting an electric field induced by a standard current source is proposed.Our goals were real-time tracking and location of stationary or moving underwater equipment both in shallow and deep seas,under noisy conditions.The main features of this method are as follows:(1)a standard current source on the water surface,which can be towed by a vehicle,consisting of two electrodes,a signal generator,and a GPS unit;(2)measurement of the extremely low frequency(ELF)electric field emitted by the current source,made possible by electric field sensors on the underwater equipment;(3)position of the underwater equipment is estimated in real time based on a progressive update extended Kalman filter(PUEKF),which is carried out using the propagation model of an ELF electric field because the electric field at the position of the underwater equipment and the current source position are known.We verified the accuracy of our method and confirmed real-time location feasibility through numerical,physical scale,and real-time sea experiments.Through numerical experiments,we verified that our method works for underwater equipment location in real-world conditions,and the location error can be less than 0.2 m.Next,real-time location experiments for stationary underwater measuring equipment in water tank were conducted.The result shows that the location error can be less than 0.1 m.We also confirmed real-time location feasibility through the use of offshore experiment.We expect that our method will complement conventional underwater acoustic location methods for underwater equipment in acoustically noisy environments.

Multi-AUV Inspection for Process Monitoring of Underwater Oil Transportation

Dear Editor,This letter presents an inspection method for process monitoring of underwater oil transportation via multiple autonomous underwater vehicles(AUV).To improve the adaptability of our method in practice,we introduce the dynamic complex ocean current data to the previously mentioned case by using regional ocean modeling system(ROMS)for the first time.

Underwater Cable Localization Method Based on Beetle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

Dear Editor,This letter concerns the localization of three-core underwater cables which are widely deployed for offshore energy transmission.It is a non-trivial problem,since the external magnetic field of threecore underwater cables is variable which reduces the accuracy of localization.To solve this problem,in this letter,an approximate equation is firstly derived to formulate the external magnetic field of a three-core armored underwater cable by considering the seafloor environments and the structure of three-core cables.

Underwater Data-Driven Positioning Estimation Using Local Spatiotemporal Nonlinear Correlation

Dear Editor,A global and local canonical correlation analysis(GLCCA)based on data-driven is presented for underwater positioning.Underwater positioning technology can help the underwater targets move predetermined destinations for specific tasks[1].Since using different sensor,underwater positioning can be divided into three types:inertial navigation,hydroacoustic positioning and geophysical navigation.

Fundamental Limits of Doppler Shift-Based, ToA-Based,and TDoA-Based Underwater Localization

Dear Editor,This paper is concerned with the underwater localization based on acoustic signals. Specifically, we will focus on the search of an underwater target that can constantly broadcast a beacon signal, such as a black box. Common measurements for localization are Doppler shift [1], time of arrival(ToA) [2]–[4], time difference of arrival(TDoA) [5], [6], angle of arrival(AoA) [7], etc.

Secure Underwater Distributed Antenna Systems: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

Dear Editor,Underwater distributed antenna systems(DAS) are stationary infrastructures consisting of multiple geographically distributed antenna elements(DAEs) which are interconnected through high-rate backbone networks [1]. Compared to centralized systems, the DAS could provide a larger coverage area and higher throughput for underwater acoustic(UWA) transmissions. In this work, exploiting the low sound speed in water, a multi-agent reinforcement learning(MARL)-based approach is proposed to secure underwater DAS against eavesdropping at the physical layer.