A Novel Detection Refinement Technique for Accurate Identification of Nephrops norvegicus Burrows in Underwater Imagery

With the evolution of the convolutional neural network (CNN), object detection in the underwater environment has gained a lot of attention. However, due to the complex nature of the underwater environment, generic CNN-based object detectors still face challenges in underwater object detection. These challenges include image blurring, texture distortion, color shift, and scale variation, which result in low precision and recall rates. To tackle this challenge, we propose a detection refinement algorithm based on spatial-temporal analysis to improve the performance of generic detectors by suppressing the false positives and recovering the missed detections in underwater videos. In the proposed work, we use state-of-the-art deep neural networks such as Inception, ResNet50, and ResNet101 to automatically classify and detect the Norway lobster Nephrops norvegicus burrows from underwater videos. Nephrops is one of the most important commercial species in Northeast Atlantic waters, and it lives in burrow systems that it builds itself on muddy bottoms. To evaluate the performance of proposed framework, we collected the data from the Gulf of Cadiz. From experiment results, we demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively suppresses false positives and recovers missed detections obtained from generic detectors. The mean average precision (mAP) gained a 10% increase with the proposed refinement technique.