YOLOv5s-CA: A Modified YOLOv5s Network with Coordinate Attention for Underwater Target Detection

Underwater target detection techniques have been extensively applied to underwater vehicles for marine surveillance, aquaculture, and rescue applications. However, due to complex underwater environments and insufficient training samples, the existing underwater target recognition algorithm accuracy is still unsatisfactory. A long-term effort is essential to improving underwater target detection accuracy. To achieve this goal, in this work, we propose a modified YOLOv5s network, called YOLOv5s-CA network, by embedding a Coordinate Attention (CA) module and a Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module, aiming to concentrate more computing power on the target to improve detection accuracy. Based on the existing YOLOv5s network, the number of bottlenecks in the first C3 module was increased from one to three to improve the performance of shallow feature extraction. The CA module was embedded into the C3 modules to improve the attention power focused on the target. The SE layer was added to the output of the C3 modules to strengthen model attention. Experiments on the data of the 2019 China Underwater Robot Competition were conducted, and the results demonstrate that the mean Average Precision (mAP) of the modified YOLOv5s network was increased by 2.4%.