Obstacle Detection for Unmanned Surface Vehicles by Fusion Refinement Network

Abstract

As a kind of marine vehicles, Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) are widely used in military and civilian fields because of their low cost, good concealment, strong mobility and high speed. High-precision detection of obstacles plays an important role in USV autonomous navigation, which ensures its subsequent path planning. In order to further improve obstacle detection performance, we propose an encoder-decoder architecture named Fusion Refinement Network (FRN). The encoder part with a deeper network structure enables it to extract more rich visual features. In particular, a dilated convolution layer is used in the encoder for obtaining a large range of obstacle features in complex marine environment. The decoder part achieves the multiple path feature fusion. Attention Refinement Modules (ARM) are added to optimize features, and a learnable fusion algorithm called Feature Fusion Module (FFM) is used to fuse visual information. Experimental validation results on three different datasets with real marine images show that FRN is superior to state-of-the-art semantic segmentation networks in performance evaluation. And the MIoU and MPA of the FRN can peak at 97.01% and 98.37% respectively. Moreover, FRN could maintain a high accuracy with only 27.67M parameters, which is much smaller than the latest obstacle detection network (WaSR) for USV.