A Marine Debris Detection Framework for Ocean Robots via Self-Attention Enhancement and Feature Interaction Optimization
Abstract
Marine debris detection for ocean robot is crucial for ecological protection, yet performance is often degraded by low-quality images with blur, complex backgrounds, and small targets. To address these challenges, we propose YOLO-MD, an enhanced YOLO-based detection framework. A Dual-Branch Convolutional Enhanced Self-Attention (DB-CASA) module is designed to strengthen spatial-channel interactions, improving feature representation in degraded images. Additionally, a lightweight shift-based operation is introduced to enhance fine-grained feature extraction for objects of varying scales while maintaining parameter efficiency. We further propose SFG-Loss to mitigate class imbalance and optimization instability via dynamic sample reweighting. Experiments on the UODM dataset demonstrate that YOLO-MD achieves 0.875 precision, 0.822 F1-score, and 0.849 mAP50, outperforming the latest state-of-the-art methods. The effectiveness of this method has also been verified through real-world robotic edge deployment experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.07388,
title = {A Marine Debris Detection Framework for Ocean Robots via Self-Attention Enhancement and Feature Interaction Optimization},
author = {Yuyang Li and Jiashu Han and Yinyi Lai and Wenbin Kang and Zenghui Liu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.07388},
year = {2026}
}