Balancing Feature Symmetry: IFEM-YOLOv13 for Robust Underwater Object Detection Under Degradation

This paper proposes IFEM-YOLOv13, a high-precision underwater target detection method designed to address challenges such as image degradation, low contrast, and small target obscurity caused by light attenuation, scattering, and biofouling. Its core innovation is an end-to-end degradation-aware system featuring: (1) an Intelligent Feature Enhancement Module (IFEM) that employs learnable sharpening and pixel-level filtering for adaptive optical compensation, incorporating principles of symmetry in its multi-branch enhancement to balance color and structural recovery; (2) a degradation-aware Focal Loss incorporating dynamic gradient remapping and class balancing to mitigate sample imbalance through symmetry-preserving optimization; and (3) a cross-layer feature association mechanism for multi-scale contextual modeling that respects the inherent scale symmetry of natural objects. Evaluated on the J-EDI dataset, IFEM-YOLOv13 achieves 98.6% mAP@0.5 and 82.1% mAP@0.5:0.95, outperforming the baseline YOLOv13 by 0.7% and 3.0%, respectively. With only 2.5 M parameters and operating at 217 FPS, it surpasses methods including Faster R-CNN, YOLO variants, and RE-DETR. These results demonstrate its robust real-time detection capability for diverse underwater targets such as plastic debris, biofouled objects, and artificial structures, while effectively handling the symmetry-breaking distortions introduced by the underwater environment.