An Improved YOLO-Based Algorithm for Aquaculture Object Detection

Object detection technology plays a vital role in monitoring the growth status of aquaculture organisms and serves as a key enabler for the automated robotic capture of target species. Existing models for underwater biological detection often suffer from low accuracy and high model complexity. To address these limitations, we propose AOD-YOLO—an enhanced model based on YOLOv11s. The improvements are fourfold: First, the SPFE (Sobel and Pooling Feature Enhancement) module incorporates Sobel operators and pooling operations to effectively extract target edge information and global structural features, thereby strengthening feature representation. Second, the RGL (RepConv and Ghost Lightweight) module reduces redundancy in intermediate feature mappings of the convolutional neural network, decreasing parameter size and computational cost while further enhancing feature extraction capability through RepConv. Third, the MDCS (Multiple Dilated Convolution Sharing Module) module replaces the SPPF structure by integrating parameter-shared dilated convolutions, improving multi-scale target recognition. Finally, we upgrade the C2PSA module to C2PSA-M (Cascade Pyramid Spatial Attention—Mona) by integrating the Mona mechanism. This upgraded module introduces multi-cognitive filters to enhance visual signal processing and employs a distribution adaptation layer to optimize input information distribution. Experiments conducted on the URPC2020 and RUOD datasets demonstrate that AOD-YOLO achieves an accuracy of 86.6% on URPC2020, representing a 2.6% improvement over YOLOv11s, and 88.1% on RUOD, a 2.4% increase. Moreover, the model maintains relatively low complexity with only 8.73 M parameters and 21.4 GFLOPs computational cost. Experimental results show that our model achieves high accuracy for aquaculture targets while maintaining low complexity. This demonstrates its strong potential for reliable use in intelligent aquaculture monitoring systems.