ARD-Net: Alligator gar real-time detection network model

Abstract When using advanced detection algorithms to monitor alligator gar in real-time in wild waters, the efficiency of existing detection algorithms is subject to certain limitations due to turbid water quality, poor underwater lighting conditions, and obstruction by other objects. In order to solve this problem, we developed a lightweight real-time detection network model called ARD-Net, from the perspective of reducing the amount of calculation and obtaining more feature map patterns. We introduced a cross-domain grid matching strategy to accelerate network convergence, and combined the involution operator and dual-channel attention mechanism to build a more lightweight feature extractor and multi-scale detection reasoning network module to enhance the network’s response to different semantics. Compared with the yoloV5 baseline model, our method performs equivalently in terms of detection accuracy, but the model is smaller, the detection speed is increased by 1.48 times, and has good real-time performance. Additionally, we created a dataset of alligator gar images for training.