Multi-Mode Channel Position Attention Fusion Side-Scan Sonar Transfer Recognition

Side-scan sonar (SSS) target recognition is an important part of building an underwater detection system and ensuring a high-precision perception of underwater information. In this paper, a novel multi-channel multi-location attention mechanism is proposed for a multi-modal phased transfer side-scan sonar target recognition model. Optical images from the ImageNet database, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and SSS images are used as the training datasets. The backbone network for feature extraction is transferred and learned by a staged transfer learning method. The head network used to predict the type of target extracts the attention features of SSS through a multi-channel and multi-position attention mechanism, and subsequently performs target recognition. The proposed model is tested on the SSS test dataset and evaluated using several metrics, and compared with different recognition algorithms as well. The results show that the model has better recognition accuracy and robustness for SSS targets.