Improved YOLOv4 Marine Target Detection Combined with CBAM

Marine target detection technology plays an important role in sea surface monitoring, sea area management, ship collision avoidance, and other fields. Traditional marine target detection algorithms cannot meet the requirements of accuracy and speed. This article uses the advantages of deep learning in big data feature learning to propose the YOLOv4 marine target detection method fused with a convolutional attention module. Marine target detection datasets were collected and produced and marine targets were divided into ten categories, including speedboat, warship, passenger ship, cargo ship, sailboat, tugboat, and kayak. Aiming at the problem of insufficient detection accuracy of YOLOv4’s self-built marine target dataset, a convolutional attention module is added to the YOLOv4 network to increase the weight of useful features while suppressing the weight of invalid features to improve detection accuracy. The experimental results show that the improved YOLOv4 has higher detection accuracy than the original YOLOv4, and has better detection results for small targets, multiple targets, and overlapping targets. The detection speed meets the real-time requirements, verifying the effectiveness of the improved algorithm.