Realtime Detection of Benthic Marine Invertebrates from Underwater Images: A Comparison between YOLO and Transformer Models

Benthic marine invertebrates, the invertebrates living on the bottom of the ocean, are an essential component of the marine ecosystem, but excessive reproduction of invertebrate grazers or pirate creatures can cause damage to the coastal fishery ecosystem. In this study, we compared and evaluated You Only Look Once Version 7 (YOLOv7), the most widely used deep learning model for real-time object detection, and detection tansformer (DETR), a transformer-based model, using underwater images for benthic marine invertebrates in the coasts of South Korea. YOLOv7 showed a mean average precision at 0.5 (mAP@0.5) of 0.899, and DETR showed an mAP@0.5 of 0.862, which implies that YOLOv7 is more appropriate for object detection of various sizes. This is because YOLOv7 generates the bounding boxes at multiple scales that can help detect small objects. Both models had a processing speed of more than 30 frames per second (FPS), so it is expected that real-time object detection from the images provided by divers and underwater drones will be possible. The proposed method can be used to prevent and restore damage to coastal fisheries ecosystems, such as rescuing invertebrate grazers and creating sea forests to prevent ocean desertification.