# SU-YOLO: Spiking Neural Network for Efficient Underwater Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24389 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24389/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Surrogate Gradient Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09948/) (2019)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Spatio-Temporal Backpropagation for Training High-performance Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02609/) (2017)
- [CSPNet: A New Backbone that can Enhance Learning Capability of CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11929/) (2019)
- [Deep Residual Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04159/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper With Directly-Trained Larger Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05280/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08150/) (2018)
- [Direct Training for Spiking Neural Networks: Faster, Larger, Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05793/) (2018)
- [Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks using Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08782/) (2016)
- [Spiking-YOLO: Spiking Neural Network for Energy-Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06530/) (2019)
- [SpikingJelly: An open-source machine learning infrastructure platform for spike-based intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16620/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Batch Normalization for Training Low-latency Deep Spiking Neural Networks from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01729/) (2020)
- [Deep Directly-Trained Spiking Neural Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11411/) (2023)
- [Integer-Valued Training and Spike-Driven Inference Spiking Neural Network for High-performance and Energy-efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20708/) (2024)
- [YOLOv6 v3.0: A Full-Scale Reloading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05586/) (2023)
- [Fast-SNN: Fast Spiking Neural Network by Converting Quantized ANN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19868/) (2023)
- [A Fully Spiking Hybrid Neural Network for Energy-Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10719/) (2021)
- [A New Dataset, Poisson GAN and AquaNet for Underwater Object Grabbing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01446/) (2020)
- [Spike Calibration: Fast and Accurate Conversion of Spiking Neural Network for Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02702/) (2022)
- [Towards Low-latency Event-based Visual Recognition with Hybrid Step-wise Distillation Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12507/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Expose Camouflage in the Water: Underwater Camouflaged Instance Segmentation and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17585/) (2025)
- [Improve Underwater Object Detection through YOLOv12 Architecture and Physics-informed Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23505/) (2025)
- [Brain-Inspired Multimodal Spiking Neural Network for Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26787/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Enhancement and Dual-Pooling Sequential Attention for Lightweight Underwater Object Detection with YOLOv10](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03807/) (2026)
- [Aquatic Neuromorphic Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07653/) (2026)
- [Neuromorphic Object Detection: An In-Depth Study and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23576/) (2026)
- [Spiking Neural Networks for Energy-Efficient Object Detection in Forward-Looking Sonar Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22072/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater object detection is critical for oceanic research and industrial safety inspections. However, the complex optical environment and the limited resources of underwater equipment pose significant challenges to achieving high accuracy and low power consumption. To address these issues, we propose Spiking Underwater YOLO (SU-YOLO), a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) model. Leveraging the lightweight and energy-efficient properties of SNNs, SU-YOLO incorporates a novel spike-based underwater image denoising method based solely on integer addition, which enhances the quality of feature maps with minimal computational overhead. In addition, we introduce Separated Batch Normalization (SeBN), a technique that normalizes feature maps independently across multiple time steps and is optimized for integration with residual structures to capture the temporal dynamics of SNNs more effectively. The redesigned spiking residual blocks integrate the Cross Stage Partial Network (CSPNet) with the YOLO architecture to mitigate spike degradation and enhance the model's feature extraction capabilities. Experimental results on URPC2019 underwater dataset demonstrate that SU-YOLO achieves mAP of 78.8% with 6.97M parameters and an energy consumption of 2.98 mJ, surpassing mainstream SNN models in both detection accuracy and computational efficiency. These results underscore the potential of SNNs for engineering applications. The code is available in https://github.com/lwxfight/snn-underwater.