The invention discloses an
underwater target recognition method based on an improved YOLOv8
algorithm, and the method comprises the steps: inputting an
underwater image into an improved YOLOv8n model for
underwater target detection, and obtaining an output underwater target recognition result. The method has the advantages that the
convolution blocks of the P5 layer of the
backbone network and the last layer of the neck network adopt DSConv, so that the
network complexity is reduced, and the reasoning speed is increased; a fourth C2f module of the
backbone network adopts a C2f DiRMB module in which an inverted residual attention mechanism and dual-channel
convolution are introduced, so that the capability of capturing key
global information of the network is enhanced, training parameters are reduced, and the understanding of a complex scene is improved; and finally, a
small target detection head for improving the
small target detection capability is additionally arranged in the head network. According to the underwater target identification method, the mAP (at) is 0.5%, the mAP (at) is 0.5-0.95%, and the accuracy and the
recall rate are respectively improved by 0.5%, 0.8%, 0.5% and 1.0%.