Due to the abundant natural resources of the underwater world, autonomous exploration using underwater robots has become an effective technological tool in recent years. Real-time object detection is critical when employing robots for independent underwater exploration. However, when a robot detects underwater, its computing power is usually limited, which makes it challenging to detect objects effectively. To solve this problem, this study presents a novel algorithm for underwater object detection based on YOLOv4-tiny to achieve better performance with less computational cost. First, a symmetrical bottleneck-type structure is introduced into the YOLOv4-tiny’s backbone network based on dilated convolution and 1 × 1 convolution. It captures contextual information in feature maps with reasonable computational cost and improves the mAP score by 8.74% compared to YOLOv4-tiny. Second, inspired by the convolutional block attention module, a symmetric FPN-Attention module is constructed by integrating the channel-attention module and the spatial-attention module. Features extracted by the backbone network can be fused more efficiently by the symmetric FPN-Attention module, achieving a performance improvement of 8.75% as measured by mAP score compared to YOLOv4-tiny. Finally, this work proposed the YOLO-UOD for underwater object detection through the fusion of the YOLOv4-tiny structure, symmetric FPN-Attention module, symmetric bottleneck-type dilated convolutional layers, and label smoothing training strategy. It can efficiently detect underwater objects in an embedded system environment with limited computing power. Experiments show that the proposed YOLO-UOD outperforms the baseline model on the Brackish underwater dataset, with a detection mAP of 87.88%, 10.5% higher than that of YOLOv4-tiny’s 77.38%, and the detection result exceeds YOLOv5s’s 83.05% and YOLOv5m’s 84.34%. YOLO-UOD is deployed on the embedded system Jetson Nano 2 GB with a detection speed of 9.24 FPS, which shows that it can detect effectively in scenarios with limited computing power.

Due to the abundant natural resources of the underwater world, autonomous exploration using underwater robots has become an effective technological tool in recent years. Real-time object detection is critical when robots are employed for underwater autonomous exploration, but improving the performance of existing object detection algorithms generally comes at the cost of processing resources, making it difficult to apply the algorithms successfully on embedded devices. This research, based on YOLOV4-tiny, proposes an underwater object detection algorithm based on attention module enhancement, abbreviated as YOLO-UDA. The algorithm first introduces a dilated convolution in the model, which is used to enrich the contextual information in the images; second, we introduce an attention module in the network, which allows the model to achieve light-weighting while maintaining high detection accuracy; and third, label smoothing is used to prevent the model from overfitting, increasing its generalizability. The Brackish underwater dataset is used to train, verify, and test the algorithm model. The experimental results show that compared with YOLOv4-tiny, the mAP of YOLO-UDA algorithm is improved by about 3.61%, and the underwater object detection speed reaches 9.24 FPS on Jetson Nano 2GB.

Traditional 3D object detectors, whether fully-, semi-, or weakly-supervised, rely heavily on extensive human annotations. In contrast, this paper introduces an unsupervised 3D object detector that automatically discerns object patterns without such annotations. To achieve this, we propose a Commonsense Prototype-based Detector (CPD) for unsupervised 3D object detection. CPD first constructs Commonsense Prototypes (CProto) to represent the geometric center and size of objects. It then generates high-quality pseudo-labels and guides detector convergence using size and geometry priors from CProto. Building on CPD, we further introduce CPD++, an enhanced version that improves performance by leveraging motion cues. CPD++ learns localization from stationary objects and recognition from moving objects, facilitating the mutual transfer of localization and recognition knowledge between these two object types. Both CPD and CPD++ outperform existing state-of-the-art unsupervised 3D detectors. Furthermore, when trained on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) and tested on KITTI, CPD++ achieves 89.25% 3D Average Precision (AP) on the moderate car class at a 0.5 IoU threshold, reaching 95.3% of the performance attained by fully supervised counterparts. These results underscore the significant advancements brought by our method.

Enhancing perception performance via multi-agent collaboration has gained increasing attention in the field of autonomous driving. However, as the number of agents grows, the manual annotation required for training collaborative detectors increases significantly. To tackle this problem, we introduce an unsupervised method that learns to Detect Objects from Multi-Agent LiDAR scans, named DOtA, without using labels from external. DOtA first generates preliminary labels by an initial detector, which is trained by internally shared information of collaborative agents. DOtA then optimizes these preliminary labels by utilizing the physical rule constraints derived from the surrounding area of the object. Building on DOtA, we further propose DOtA++, an enhanced version that improves performance by leveraging composite prior constraints. Beyond physical rule constraints, DOtA++ further uses image data as an auxiliary modality to introduce multi-agent observation consistency constraints, boosting object classification, while also incorporating point cloud geometric distribution constraints to improve structural description. Extensive experiments on widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that DOtA and DOtA++ effectively perceive potential objects in the scene without manual annotations. In particular, DOtA++ shows 10.7% mAP improvement over traditional unsupervised methods on V2X-R dataset.