Prior-Guided Parallel Residual Bi-Fusion Network in USV Obstacle Detection

In this paper, we propose a novel Prior-Guided Parallel Residual Bi-Fusion Feature Pyramid Network (PPRB-FPN) for accurate obstacle detection in unmanned surface vehicle (USV) sailing. Our method tackles the challenge of detecting small objects, which are prone to information vanishing. To the end, we leverage the PRB-FPN for small object detection and YOLOv7 as a single-stage object detector to effectively identify obstacles. Our experimental results on the Obstacle Detection Challenge dataset at the 1st Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) demonstrate that our method outperforms both Mask R-CNN (mrcnn) and YOLOv7, achieving an F_avg score of 0.514.