Abstract:Addressing the issue of underwater target ambiguity, this paper proposes UW-YOLOv8, an underwater target detection algorithm based on an improved YOLOv8. This algorithm incorporates EfficientNetV1 as the backbone network. By scaling the depth, width, and resolution of the network in a balanced manner, EfficientNetV1 enhances feature extraction capabilities. Additionally, the Hybrid Attention (HAT) mechanism is introduced in the neck part, which integrates channel attention mechanisms to strengthen the relationships between pixels and feature interactions, effectively tackling low-resolution underwater images. The innovative Adaptive Spatial Feature Fusion (ASFF) method is employed in the detection head, combined with an extra small target detection layer, enabling the fusion of features from different hierarchical feature maps. This facilitates more detailed extraction of small target features and improves the detection accuracy for small-scale targets. Experimental results based on 6,000 blurred images selected from the URPC2020 dataset demonstrate that UW-YOLOv8 achieves improvements of 2.8% and 3% in mAP50 and mAP50-95, respectively, compared to YOLOv8.