UW-YOLO-Bio: A Real-Time Lightweight Detector for Underwater Biological Perception with Global and Regional Context Awareness

Accurate biological detection is crucial for autonomous navigation of underwater robots, yet severely challenged by optical degradation and scale variation in marine environments. While image enhancement and domain adaptation methods offer some mitigation, they often operate as disjointed preprocessing steps, potentially introducing artifacts and compromising downstream detection performance. Furthermore, existing architectures struggle to balance accuracy, computational efficiency, and robustness across the extreme scale variability of marine organisms in challenging underwater conditions. To overcome these limitations, we propose UW-YOLO-Bio, a novel framework built upon the YOLOv8 architecture. Our approach integrates three dedicated modules: (1) The Global Context 3D Perception Module (GCPM), which captures long-range dependencies to mitigate occlusion and noise without the quadratic cost of self-attention; (2) The Channel-Aggregation Efficient Downsampling Block (CAEDB), which preserves critical information from low-contrast targets during spatial reduction; (3) The Regional Context Feature Pyramid Network (RCFPN), which optimizes multi-scale fusion with contextual awareness for small marine organisms. Extensive evaluations on DUO, RUOD, and URPC datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving an average improvement in mAP50 of up to 2.0% across benchmarks while simultaneously reducing model parameters by 8.3%. Notably, it maintains a real-time inference speed of 61.8 FPS, rendering it highly suitable for deployment on resource-constrained autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).