An Underwater Target Recognition Method Based on Feature Fusion and Balanced Ensemble Transfer Learning

In underwater target recognition scenarios, challenges arise as a result of the limited representational capability of acoustic images with single time-frequency features and poor recognition performance due to class imbalances in sample numbers. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes an underwater target recognition method based on feature fusion and balanced ensemble transfer learning. A LiT-INN dual-branch auto-encoder network architecture is employed for time-frequency image feature fusion to solve the weak feature representation capability of single time–frequency features. The Restormer network serves as a shared feature encoder to extract fundamental features, enabling feature fusion of underwater target echo time–frequency image data and generating a fusion image dataset with richer feature information. In order to address class imbalance in sample sizes, a balanced ensemble transfer learning method is constructed using a two-stage decoupled fine-tuning learning method. The first stage employs a uniform sampler strategy to fine-tune the feature extraction module of a pre-trained transfer learning model. The second stage uses multiple balanced sampling optimization methods to fine-tune the classifier. Then, a weight averaging ensemble learning method performs decision-level fusion of multiple weak classifiers. Field test data from three target classes validated the performance of the algorithm, demonstrating a 3% improvement in average recognition accuracy compared to deep transfer learning methods under different imbalance ratios. This method effectively enhances recognition performance for classes with limited samples while significantly boosting overall recognition accuracy, offering a novel solution for underwater target recognition.