Edge‐guided representation learning for underwater object detection

Abstract Underwater object detection (UOD) is crucial for marine economic development, environmental protection, and the planet's sustainable development. The main challenges of this task arise from low‐contrast, small objects, and mimicry of aquatic organisms. The key to addressing these challenges is to focus the model on obtaining more discriminative information. The authors observe that the edges of underwater objects are highly unique and can be distinguished from low‐contrast or mimicry environments based on their edges. Motivated by this observation, an Edge‐guided Representation Learning Network, termed ERL‐Net is proposed, that aims to achieve discriminative representation learning and aggregation under the guidance of edge cues. Firstly, an edge‐guided attention module is introduced to model the explicit boundary information, which generates more discriminative features. Secondly, a hierarchical feature aggregation module is proposed to aggregate the multi‐scale discriminative features by regrouping them into three levels, effectively aggregating global and local information for locating and recognising underwater objects. Finally, a wide and asymmetric receptive field block is proposed to enable features to have a wider receptive field, allowing the model to focus on smaller object information. Comprehensive experiments on three challenging underwater datasets show that our method achieves superior performance on the UOD task.