Remote Sensing, Vol. 15, Pages 2896: Gas Plume Target Detection in Multibeam Water Column Image Using Deep Residual Aggregation Structure and Attention Mechanism (Remote Sensing)

A multibeam water column image (WCI) can provide detailed seabed information and is an important means of underwater target detection. However, gas plume targets in an image have no obvious contour information and are susceptible to the influence of underwater environments, equipment noises, and other factors, resulting in varied shapes and sizes. Compared with traditional detection methods, this paper proposes an improved YOLOv7 (You Only Look Once vision 7) network structure for detecting gas plume targets in a WCI. Firstly, Fused-MBConv is used to replace all convolutional blocks in the ELAN (Efficient Layer Aggregation Networks) module to form the ELAN-F (ELAN based on the Fused-MBConv block) module, which accelerates model convergence. Additionally, based on the ELAN-F module, MBConv is used to replace the 3 × 3 convolutional blocks to form the ELAN-M (ELAN based on the MBConv block) module, which reduces the number of model parameters. Both ELAN-F and ELAN-M modules are deep residual aggregation structures used to fuse multilevel features and enhance information expression. Furthermore, the ELAN-F1M3 (ELAN based on one Fused-MBConv block and three MBConv blocks) backbone network structure is designed to fully leverage the efficiency of the ELAN-F and ELAN-M modules. Finally, the SimAM attention block is added into the neck network to guide the network to pay more attention to the feature information related to the gas plume target at different scales and to improve model robustness. Experimental results show that this method can accurately detect gas plume targets in a complex WCI and has greatly improved performance compared to the baseline.