Abstract: Modern underwater object detection methods recognize objects from sonar data based on their geometric shapes. However, the distortion of objects during data acquisition and representation is seldom considered. In this paper, we present a detailed summary of representations for sonar data and a concrete analysis of the geometric characteristics of different data representations. Based on this, a feature fusion framework is proposed to fully use the intensity features extracted from the polar image representation and the geometric features learned from the point cloud representation of sonar data. Three feature fusion strategies are presented to investigate the impact of feature fusion on different components of the detection pipeline. In addition, the fusion strategies can be easily integrated into other detectors, such as the You Only Look Once (YOLO) series. The effectiveness of our proposed framework and feature fusion strategies is demonstrated on a public sonar dataset captured in real-world underwater environments. Experimental results show that our method benefits both the region proposal and the object classification modules in the detectors.

Key words: Underwater object detection; Sonar data representation; Feature fusion

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