SC-DiatomNet: An Efficient and Accurate Algorithm for Diatom Classification

Detecting the quantity and diversity of diatoms is of great significance in areas such as climate change, water quality assessment, and oil exploration. Here, an efficient and accurate object detection model, named SC-DiatomNet, is proposed for diatom detection in complex environments. This model is based on the YOLOv3 architecture and uses the K-means++ algorithm for anchor box clustering on the diatom dataset. A convolutional block attention module is incorporated in the feature extraction network to enhance the model’s ability to recognize important regions. A spatial pyramid pooling module and adaptive anchor boxes are added to the encoder to improve detection accuracy for diatoms of different sizes. Experimental results show that SC-DiatomNet can successfully detect and classify diatoms accurately without reducing detection speed. The recall, precision, and F1 score were 94.96%, 94.21%, and 0.94, respectively. It further improved the mean average precision (mAP) of YOLOv3 by 9.52% on the diatom dataset. Meanwhile, the detection accuracy was improved compared with those of other advanced deep learning algorithms. SC-DiatomNet has potential applications in water quality analysis and monitoring of harmful algal blooms.