SCoralDet: Efficient real-time underwater soft coral detection with YOLO

In recent years, climate change and marine pollution have significantly degraded coral reefs, highlighting the urgent need for automated coral detection to monitor marine ecosystems. However, underwater coral detection presents unique challenges, including low image contrast, complex coral structures, and dense coral growth, which limit the effectiveness of general object detection algorithms. To address these challenges, we propose SCoralDet, a soft coral detection model based on the YOLO architecture. First, we introduce a Multi-Path Fusion Block (MPFB) to capture coral features across multiple scales, enhancing the model’s robustness to uneven lighting and image blurring. We further improve inference efficiency by applying reparameterization. Second, we integrate lightweight components such as GSConv and VoV-GSCSP to reduce computational overhead without sacrificing performance. Additionally, we develop an Adaptive Power Transformation label assignment strategy, which dynamically adjusts anchor alignment metrics. By incorporating soft labels and soft central region loss, our model is guided to prioritize high-quality, well-aligned predictions. We evaluate SCoralDet on the Soft-Coral dataset, achieving an inference latency of 9.52 ms and an mAP50 of 81.9. This surpasses the performance of YOLOv5 (79.9), YOLOv6 (79.4), YOLOv8 (79.5), YOLOv9 (78.3), and YOLOv10 (79.5). These results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of SCoralDet in underwater coral detection tasks.