Performance Comparison of Sea Cucumber Detection by the Yolov5 and DETR Approach

Sea cucumber detection represents an important step in underwater environmental perception, which is an indispensable part of the intelligent subsea fishing system. However, water turbidity decreases the clarity of underwater images, presenting a challenge to vision-based underwater target detection. Therefore, accurate, real-time, and lightweight detection models are required. First of all, the development of subsea target detection is summarized in this present work. Object detection methods based on deep learning including YOLOv5 and DETR, which are, respectively, examples of one-stage and anchor-free object detection approaches, have been increasingly applied in underwater detection scenarios. Based on the state-of-the-art underwater sea cucumber detection methods and aiming to provide a reference for practical subsea identification, adjacent and overlapping sea cucumber detection based on YOLOv5 and DETR are investigated and compared in detail. For each approach, the detection experiment is carried out on the derived dataset, which consists of a wide variety of sea cucumber sample images. Experiments demonstrate that YOLOv5 surpasses DETR in low computing consumption and high precision, particularly in the detection of small and dense features. Nevertheless, DETR exhibits rapid development and holds promising prospects in underwater object detection applications, owing to its relatively simple architecture and ingenious attention mechanism.