For aquaculture resource evaluation and ecological environment monitoring, the automatic detection and identification of marine organisms is critical; however, due to the low quality of underwater images and the characteristics of underwater biological detection, the lack of abundant features can impede traditional hand-designed feature extraction approaches or CNN-based object detection algorithms, particularly in complex underwater environments. Therefore, the goal of this study was to perform object detection in underwater environments. This study developed a novel method for capturing feature information by adding the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to the YOLOv5 backbone network. The interference of underwater organism characteristics in object characteristics decreased and the output object information of the backbone network was enhanced. In addition, a self-adaptive global histogram stretching algorithm (SAGHS) was designed to eliminate degradation problems, such as low contrast and color loss, that are caused by underwater environmental features in order to restore image quality. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluations using the URPC2021 benchmark dataset demonstrated the effectiveness and adaptivity of the proposed methods. Additionally, this study conducted an exhaustive analysis of the impacts of training data on performance.

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For aquaculture resource evaluation and ecological environment monitoring, automatic detection and identification of marine organisms is critical. However, due to the low quality of underwater images and the characteristics of underwater biological, a lack of abundant features may impede traditional hand-designed feature extraction approaches or CNN-based object detection algorithms, particularly in complex underwater environment. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to perform object detection in the underwater environment. This paper proposed a novel method for capturing feature information, which adds the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to the YOLOv5 backbone. The interference of underwater creature characteristics on object characteristics is decreased, and the output of the backbone network to object information is enhanced. In addition, the self-adaptive global histogram stretching algorithm (SAGHS) is designed to eliminate the degradation problems such as low contrast and color loss caused by underwater environmental information to better restore image quality. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluation on the URPC2021 benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptivity of our methods. Beyond that, this paper conducts an exhaustive analysis of the role of training data on performance.