Underwater Object Classification Method Based on Depthwise Separable Convolution Feature Fusion in Sonar Images

In order to improve the accuracy of underwater object classification, according to the characteristics of sonar images, a classification method based on depthwise separable convolution feature fusion is proposed. Firstly, Markov segmentation is used to segment the highlight and shadow regions of the object to avoid the loss of information caused by simultaneous segmentation. Secondly, depthwise separable convolution is used to learn the deep information of images for feature extraction, which produces less network computation. Thirdly, features of highlight and shadow regions are fused by the parallel network structure, and pyramid pooling is added to extract the multi-scale information. Finally, the full connection layers are used to achieve object classification through the Softmax function. Experiments are conducted on simulated and real data. Results show that the method proposed in this paper achieve superior performance compared with other models, and it also has certain flexibility.