Balancing Accuracy and Speed: Improved D-FINE for Real-Time Ocean Internal Wave Detection

Ocean internal waves (IWs), induced by density stratification and fluid perturbations, are significant oceanic phenomena prevalent across global oceans, profoundly impacting marine environments and engineering safety. Although one-stage object detection models are favored in practical applications due to their efficient inference, they often suffer from insufficient accuracy in IW detection tasks. To address this, we introduce a novel one-stage, anchor-free detection approach based on Transformer for IW detection, proposing a new algorithm named IW-D-FINE, which balances detection accuracy and inference efficiency. On the public SAR dataset, IW-D-FINE achieves an AP@0.5 of 90.5, significantly outperforming existing one-stage methods while maintaining faster inference speeds than mainstream two-stage models. Furthermore, to mitigate the scarcity of internal wave samples, we construct a small-scale IWs dataset, YH3-IW-2025, and validate the algorithm thoroughly on this dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that IW-D-FINE exhibits robust performance under complex background interference, highlighting its application potential and scalability in IW detection tasks.