TY  - JOUR
JF  - Applied Ocean Research
PB  - Elsevier
Y1  - 2024/11//
N1  - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
ID  - discovery10199771
TI  - An efficient model for small object detection in the maritime environment
AV  - restricted
EP  - 16
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apor.2024.104194
A1  - Shao, Zeyuan
A1  - Yin, Yong
A1  - Lyu, Hongguang
A1  - Soares, C Guedes
A1  - Cheng, Tao
A1  - Jing, Qianfeng
A1  - Yang, Zhilin
N2  - Environmental perception is crucial for autonomous ships realizing autonomous navigation, in particular, the high-precision and low-latency detection of small objects on the sea surface is a key and challenging issue. To address this problem, this paper presents a model that improves the detection accuracy and delivers excellent real-time performance for autonomous ship navigation. The backbone of the proposed model enhances the modelling capabilities by expanding deformable convolution and introducing the self-designed attention mechanism. Additionally, an enhanced feature fusion structure is designed by the pixel shuffle based on super-resolution reconstruction to keep the integrity of feature information for small objects. This paper also presents an optimized model quantization strategy that alleviates the problem of low model efficiency caused by the limited resources onboard the ship. Compared to the earlier model, the present one has increased the mean average precision on the Rizhao Zhuimeng-3# maritime optical dataset by 4.5 % and by 21 % for small object detection. Furthermore, the real-time detection for high-resolution images can now reach a speed of 67 frames/s. Moreover, the present model outperforms existing methods concerning accuracy when the frames/s are similar. The results indicate that the proposed model can be potentially applied to autonomous ships.
VL  - 152
KW  - Autonomous navigation
KW  -  Sea surface
KW  -  Object detection Deep learning
KW  -  Model quantization
ER  -