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Towards More Efficient EfficientDets and Real-Time Marine Debris Detection
Summary
Researchers improved the efficiency of a class of AI-based object detection systems called EfficientDets for real-time identification of marine debris underwater. Their optimized models achieved better accuracy while running faster, making them more practical for use on autonomous underwater vehicles. This technology could help enable automated detection and removal of ocean plastic waste, which breaks down into harmful microplastics over time.
Marine debris is a problem both for the health of marine environments and for the human health since tiny pieces of plastic called “microplastics” resulting from the debris decomposition over the time are entering the food chain at any levels. For marine debris detection and removal, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are a potential solution. In this letter, we focus on the efficiency of AUV vision for real-time marine debris detection. First, we improved the efficiency of a class of state-of-the-art object detectors, namely EfficientDets [1], by 1.5% AP on D0, 2.6% AP on D1, 1.2% AP on D2 and 1.3% AP on D3 without increasing the GPU latency (see Fig. 1 ). Subsequently, we created and made publicly available a dataset for the detection of in-water plastic bags and bottles and trained our improved EfficientDets on this and on two public datasets for marine debris detection. Finally, we began the testing of real-time detection performance on a simulator of marine environments.