CATNet: Cascaded attention transformer network for marine species image classification

Abstract

Complex physicochemical environmental effects result in the underwater species images’ highly intricate and diverse backgrounds, which poses significant challenges for identifying marine species. Deep learning techniques are used extensively for image classification thanks to their exceptional feature extraction capabilities. To address the above issues, we present a cascaded attention transformer network for marine species image classification named CATNet. More specifically, we first utilize the efficient channel attention module with depthwise convolution, which can efficiently extract the essential features of the image and reduce the computational parameters of the traditional attention module. Subsequently, we design a stacked transformer module to focus on the different features among a large amount of feature information, thereby reducing redundancy and improving?the generalization performance of CATNet. To comprehensively exploit the features extracted from different modules, we integrate the efficient channel attention and stacked transformer modules to construct a feature-cascaded module. Meanwhile, we construct a large-scale Marine Species Image Dataset (MSID) including 8605 underwater images with different species. Concretely, it consists of 712 coral reef images, 1270 fish images, 1082 people images, 2414 sea urchin images, 1219 squid images, 837 sea cucumber images, and 1071 turtle images. Comprehensive experimentation on our built dataset underscores the proposed CATNet’s superiority over the existing state-of-the-art methods in marine species image classification. The data is available. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381961074_2024MSID.