SCS-Mamba: a lightweight Sobel-enhanced content-aware state space model with shared deformable adaptive head for efficient underwater object detection
摘要
Underwater object detection is severely hindered by image degradation from light absorption and scattering, challenging real-time applications. This paper introduces SCS-Mamba, a lightweight and efficient detection framework designed for resource-constrained underwater platforms. Our model integrates a Sobel-enhanced stem for domain-specific edge recovery, content-aware CARAFE upsampling for detail preservation, and a parameter-efficient Shared Deformable Adaptive Head into a Mamba-based backbone. The proposed architecture has only 1.3M parameters and 6.2 GFLOPs, enabling real-time performance. Extensive experiments on six public datasets show that SCS-Mamba achieves a new state-of-the-art for efficient underwater detection, with an average of 80.6% mAP@0.5. It consistently surpasses not only lightweight YOLO variants but also heavyweight general-purpose detectors and specialized underwater models. Its domain-specific design ensures robust performance, making it highly suitable for applications on autonomous underwater vehicles and marine monitoring systems.