EMR-YOLO: A Study of Efficient Maritime Rescue Identification Algorithms

Accurate target identification of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle)-captured images is a prerequisite for maritime rescue and maritime surveillance. However, UAV-captured images pose several challenges, such as complex maritime backgrounds, tiny targets, and crowded scenes. To reduce the impact of these challenges on target recognition, we propose an efficient maritime rescue network (EMR-YOLO) for recognizing images captured by UAVs. In the proposed network, the DRC2f (Dilated Reparam-based Channel-to-Pixel) module is first designed by the Dilated Reparam Block to effectively increase the receptive field, reduce the number of parameters, and improve feature extraction capability. Then, the ADOWN downsampling module is used to mitigate fine-grained information loss, thereby improving the efficiency and performance of the model. Finally, CASPPF (Coordinate Attention-based Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast) is designed by fusing CA (Coordinate Attention) and SPPF (Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast), which effectively enhances the feature representation and spatial information integration ability, making the model more accurate and robust when dealing with complex scenes. Experimental results on the AFO dataset show that, compared with the YOLOv8s network, the EMR-YOLO network improves the mAP (mean average precision) and mAP50 by 4.7% and 9.2%, respectively, while reducing the number of parameters and computation by 22.5% and 18.7%, respectively. Overall, the use of UAVs to capture images and deep learning for maritime target recognition for maritime rescue and surveillance improves rescue efficiency and safety.