Enhanced hermit crabs detection using super-resolution reconstruction and improved YOLOv8 on UAV-captured imagery

Hermit crabs play a crucial role in coastal ecosystems by dispersing seeds, cleaning up debris, and disturbing soil. They serve as vital indicators of marine environmental health, responding to climate change and pollution. Traditional survey methods, like quadrat sampling, are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and environmentally dependent. This study presents an innovative approach combining UAV-based remote sensing with Super-Resolution Reconstruction (SRR) and the CRAB-YOLO detection network, a modification of YOLOv8s, to monitor hermit crabs. SRR enhances image quality by addressing issues such as motion blur and insufficient resolution, significantly improving detection accuracy over conventional low-resolution fuzzy images. The CRAB-YOLO network integrates three improvements for detection accuracy, hermit crab characteristics, and computational efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to other mainstream detection models. The RDN networks demonstrated the best image reconstruction performance, and CRAB-YOLO achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 69.5% on the SRR test set, a 40% improvement over the conventional Bicubic method with a magnification factor of 4. These results indicate that the proposed method is effective in detecting hermit crabs, offering a cost-effective and automated solution for extensive hermit crab monitoring, thereby aiding coastal benthos conservation.