Underwater object detection in sonar imagery with detection transformer and Zero-shot neural architecture search

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gu, XiaoTong, Tang, Shengyu, Cao, Yiming, Yu, Changdong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Gu, XiaoTong
Tang, Shengyu
Cao, Yiming
Yu, Changdong
author_facet Gu, XiaoTong
Tang, Shengyu
Cao, Yiming
Yu, Changdong
contents Underwater object detection using sonar imagery has become a critical and rapidly evolving research domain within marine technology. However, sonar images are characterized by lower resolution and sparser features compared to optical images, which seriously degrades the performance of object detection.To address these challenges, we specifically propose a Detection Transformer (DETR) architecture optimized with a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach called NAS-DETR for object detection in sonar images. First, an improved Zero-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method based on the maximum entropy principle is proposed to identify a real-time, high-representational-capacity CNN-Transformer backbone for sonar image detection. This method enables the efficient discovery of high-performance network architectures with low computational and time overhead. Subsequently, the backbone is combined with a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and a deformable attention-based Transformer decoder to construct a complete network architecture. This architecture integrates various advanced components and training schemes to enhance overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on two Representative datasets, while maintaining minimal overhead in real-time efficiency and computational complexity. Furthermore, correlation analysis between the key parameters and differential entropy-based fitness function is performed to enhance the interpretability of the proposed framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the field of sonar object detection to integrate the DETR architecture with a NAS search mechanism.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_06694
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Underwater object detection in sonar imagery with detection transformer and Zero-shot neural architecture search
Gu, XiaoTong
Tang, Shengyu
Cao, Yiming
Yu, Changdong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Underwater object detection using sonar imagery has become a critical and rapidly evolving research domain within marine technology. However, sonar images are characterized by lower resolution and sparser features compared to optical images, which seriously degrades the performance of object detection.To address these challenges, we specifically propose a Detection Transformer (DETR) architecture optimized with a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach called NAS-DETR for object detection in sonar images. First, an improved Zero-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method based on the maximum entropy principle is proposed to identify a real-time, high-representational-capacity CNN-Transformer backbone for sonar image detection. This method enables the efficient discovery of high-performance network architectures with low computational and time overhead. Subsequently, the backbone is combined with a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and a deformable attention-based Transformer decoder to construct a complete network architecture. This architecture integrates various advanced components and training schemes to enhance overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on two Representative datasets, while maintaining minimal overhead in real-time efficiency and computational complexity. Furthermore, correlation analysis between the key parameters and differential entropy-based fitness function is performed to enhance the interpretability of the proposed framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the field of sonar object detection to integrate the DETR architecture with a NAS search mechanism.
title Underwater object detection in sonar imagery with detection transformer and Zero-shot neural architecture search
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06694