# SPMamba-YOLO: An Underwater Object Detection Network Based on Multi-Scale Feature Enhancement and Global Context Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22674/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (2022)
- [R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05612/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Head: Unifying Object Detection Heads with Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08322/) (2021)
- [WaterGAN: Unsupervised Generative Network to Enable Real-time Color Correction of Monocular Underwater Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07392/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Generative Adversarial Networks for Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05274/) (2017)
- [A Normalized Gaussian Wasserstein Distance for Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13389/) (2021)
- [A Dataset And Benchmark Of Underwater Object Detection For Robot Picking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05681/) (2021)
- [Cross-Layer Feature Pyramid Transformer for Small Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19696/) (2024)
- [Edge-guided Representation Learning for Underwater Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00440/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater object detection is a critical yet challenging research problem owing to severe light attenuation, color distortion, background clutter, and the small scale of underwater targets. To address these challenges, we propose SPMamba-YOLO, a novel underwater object detection network that integrates multi-scale feature enhancement with global context modeling. Specifically, a Spatial Pyramid Pooling Enhanced Layer Aggregation Network (SPPELAN) module is introduced to strengthen multi-scale feature aggregation and expand the receptive field, while a Pyramid Split Attention (PSA) mechanism enhances feature discrimination by emphasizing informative regions and suppressing background interference. In addition, a Mamba-based state space modeling module is incorporated to efficiently capture long-range dependencies and global contextual information, thereby improving detection robustness in complex underwater environments. Extensive experiments on the URPC2022 dataset demonstrate that SPMamba-YOLO outperforms the YOLOv8n baseline by more than 4.9% in mAP@0.5, particularly for small and densely distributed underwater objects, while maintaining a favorable balance between detection accuracy and computational cost.