Seabed sediment classification is of great significance in acoustic remote sensing. To accurately classify seabed sediments, big data are needed to train the classifier. However, acquiring seabed sediment information is expensive and time-consuming, which makes it crucial to design a well-performing classifier using small-sample seabed sediment data. To avoid data shortage, a self-attention generative adversarial network (SAGAN) was trained for data augmentation in this study. SAGAN consists of a generator, which generates data similar to the real image, and a discriminator, which distinguishes whether the image is real or generated. Furthermore, a new classifier for seabed sediment based on self-attention densely connected convolutional network (SADenseNet) is proposed to improve the classification accuracy of seabed sediment. The SADenseNet was trained using augmented images to improve the classification performance. The self-attention mechanism can scan the global image to obtain global features of the sediment image and is able to highlight key regions, improving the efficiency and accuracy of visual information processing. The proposed SADenseNet trained with the augmented dataset had the best performance, with classification accuracies of 92.31%, 95.72%, 97.85%, and 95.28% for rock, sand, mud, and overall, respectively, with a kappa coefficient of 0.934. The twelve classifiers trained with the augmented dataset improved the classification accuracy by 2.25%, 5.12%, 0.97%, and 2.64% for rock, sand, mud, and overall, respectively, and the kappa coefficient by 0.041 compared to the original dataset. In this study, SAGAN can enrich the features of the data, which makes the trained classification networks have better generalization. Compared with the state-of-the-art classifiers, the proposed SADenseNet has better classification performance.
