Optimization of Underwater Marker Detection Based on YOLOv3

Abstract

The research on the detection and recognition technology of marker is of great significance for some underwater operations, such as marine resource exploration, underwater robot operation and so on. The existing image processing methods can effectively detect and recognize the markers in the air. Nevertheless, in the underwater environment, the complex imaging environment of the ocean leads to serious degradation of underwater images obtained by the optical vision system. Due to the lack of effective information for object recognition, the severely degraded underwater images increases the difficulty of detection and recognition of underwater objects. With the development of high-tech underwater imaging equipment, the quality of underwater images has been improved to a certain extent, but there are still some phenomena such as color fading, low contrast and blurred details. Solutions to overcome these problems are important for the exploration of the ocean. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning model to optimize the performance of detection, and make a unique marker dataset for the application scene of our experiment. We first use the deep learning network to pre-train the marker images in the air. Next, we use the underwater marker images for fine-tuning. Finally, after the target marker is detected, the traditional image processing method is used to recognize the marker. Experimental results show that the optimization method we proposed achieves better performance on the dataset.