# EPANet: Efficient Path Aggregation Network for Underwater Fish Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00528 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00528/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [NAS-FPN: Learning Scalable Feature Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07392/) (2019)
- [Attentional Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14082/) (2020)
- [IMAGDressing-v1: Customizable Virtual Dressing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12705/) (2024)
- [LR-FPN: Enhancing Remote Sensing Object Detection with Location Refined Feature Pyramid Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01614/) (2024)
- [Face Detection using Deep Learning: An Improved Faster RCNN Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08289/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00779/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater fish detection (UFD) remains a challenging task in computer vision due to low object resolution, significant background interference, and high visual similarity between targets and surroundings. Existing approaches primarily focus on local feature enhancement or incorporate complex attention mechanisms to highlight small objects, often at the cost of increased model complexity and reduced efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient path aggregation network (EPANet), which leverages complementary feature integration to achieve accurate and lightweight UFD. EPANet consists of two key components: an efficient path aggregation feature pyramid network (EPA-FPN) and a multi-scale diverse-division short path bottleneck (MS-DDSP bottleneck). The EPA-FPN introduces long-range skip connections across disparate scales to improve semantic-spatial complementarity, while cross-layer fusion paths are adopted to enhance feature integration efficiency. The MS-DDSP bottleneck extends the conventional bottleneck structure by introducing finer-grained feature division and diverse convolutional operations, thereby increasing local feature diversity and representation capacity. Extensive experiments on benchmark UFD datasets demonstrate that EPANet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy and inference speed, while maintaining comparable or even lower parameter complexity.