Underwater video object detection is a challenging task due to the poor quality of underwater videos, including blurriness and low contrast. In recent years, Yolo series models have been widely applied to underwater video object detection. However, these models perform poorly for blurry and low-contrast underwater videos. Additionally, they fail to account for the contextual relationships between the frame-level results. To address these challenges, we propose a video object detection model named UWV-Yolox. First, the Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization method is used to augment the underwater videos. Then, a new CSP_CA module is proposed by adding Coordinate Attention to the backbone of the model to augment the representations of objects of interest. Next, a new loss function is proposed, including regression and jitter loss. Finally, a frame-level optimization module is proposed to optimize the detection results by utilizing the relationship between neighboring frames in videos, improving the video detection performance. To evaluate the performance of our model, We construct experiments on the UVODD dataset built in the paper, and select mAP@0.5 as the evaluation metric. The mAP@0.5 of the UWV-Yolox model reaches 89.0%, which is 3.2% better than the original Yolox model. Furthermore, compared with other object detection models, the UWV-Yolox model has more stable predictions for objects, and our improvements can be flexibly applied to other models.
Keywords: coordinate attention; frame-level optimization; loss function; object detection; underwater video.