Underwater Waste Recognition and Localization Based on Improved YOLOv5

Abstract

With the continuous development of the economy and society, plastic pollution in rivers, lakes, oceans, and other bodies of water is increasingly severe, posing a serious challenge to underwater ecosystems. Effective cleaning up of underwater litter by robots relies on accurately identifying and locating the plastic waste. However, it often causes significant challenges such as noise interference, low contrast, and blurred textures in underwater optical images. A weighted fusion-based algorithm for enhancing the quality of underwater images is proposed, which combines weighted logarithmic transformations, adaptive gamma correction, improved multi-scale Retinex (MSR) algorithm, and the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) algorithm. The proposed algorithm improves brightness, contrast, and color recovery and enhances detail features resulting in better overall image quality. A network framework is proposed in this article based on the YOLOv5 model. MobileViT is used as the backbone of the network framework, detection layer is added to improve the detection capability for small targets, self-attention and mixed-attention modules are introduced to enhance the recognition capability of important features. The cross stage partial (CSP) structure is employed in the spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) section to enrich feature information, and the complete intersection over union (CIOU) loss is replaced with the focal efficient intersection over union (EIOU) loss to accelerate convergence while improving regression accuracy. Experimental results proved that the target recognition algorithm achieved a recognition accuracy of 0.913 and ensured a recognition speed of 45.56 fps/s. Subsequently, Using red, green, blue and depth (RGB-D) camera to construct a system for identifying and locating underwater plastic waste. Experiments were conducted underwater for recognition, localization, and error analysis. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for identifying and locating underwater plastic waste, and it has good localization accuracy.