Improved YOLOv8 for Complex Environmental Fish Detection

With the rapid development of computer vision and deep learning technologies, object detection plays a crucial role in various fields. Due to the complexity and diversity of underwater environments, underwater vision tasks face great challenges. In this paper, we improved the YOLOv8 detection model for the fish detection task in complex environments. Specifically, we proposed a multi-scale feature fusion method (MFANet) that combines multiscale weighted feature fusion with multiscale attention to efficiently capture multilevel features of fishes in complex environments. We designed a multiscale weighted feature fusion module that combines feature maps at different scales to enhance the model’s representation of the target. By introducing a multi-scale attention mechanism, the model is able to pay more attention to important feature regions. We conducted experiments on real underwater complex environment datasets. The results show that our proposed improved method significantly enhances the performance of the YOLOv8 model in fish detection tasks and lays a good foundation for subsequent underwater detection tasks.