Collaborative Framework for Underwater Object Detection via Joint Image Enhancement and Super-Resolution

Underwater object detection (UOD) has attracted widespread attention, being of great significance for marine resource management, underwater security and defense, underwater infrastructure inspection, etc. However, high-quality UOD tasks often encounter challenges such as image quality degradation, complex backgrounds, and occlusions between objects at different scales. This paper presents a collaborative framework for UOD via joint image enhancement and super-resolution to address the above problems. Specifically, a joint-oriented framework is constructed incorporating underwater image enhancement and super-resolution techniques. The proposed framework is capable of generating a detection-favoring appearance to provide more visual cues for UOD tasks. Furthermore, a plug-and-play self-attention mechanism, termed multihead blurpooling fusion network (MBFNet), is developed to capture sufficient contextual information by focusing on the dependencies between multiscale feature maps, so that the UOD performance of our proposed framework can be further facilitated. A comparative study on the popular URPC2020 and Brackish datasets demonstrates the superior performance of our proposed collaborative framework, and the ablation study also validates the effectiveness of each component within the framework.