Transferring deep knowledge for object recognition in Low-quality underwater videos

In recent years, underwater video technologies allow us to explore the ocean in scientific and noninvasive ways, such as environmental monitoring, marine ecology studies, and fisheries management. However the low-light and high-noise scenarios pose great challenges for the underwater image and video analysis. We here propose a CNN knowledge transfer framework for underwater object recognition and tackle the problem of extracting discriminative features from relatively low contrast images. Even with the insufficient training set, the transfer framework can well learn a recognition model for the special underwater object recognition task together with the help of data augmentation. For better identifying objects from an underwater video, a weighted probabilities decision mechanism is introduced to identify the object from a series of frames. The proposed framework can be implemented for real-time underwater object recognition on autonomous underwater vehicles and video monitoring systems. To verify the effectiveness of our method, experiments on a public dataset are carried out. The results show that the proposed method achieves promising results for underwater object recognition on both test image datasets and underwater videos.