Zhenqing Ding

Forward-looking sonar (FLS) target detection is essential for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), yet its effectiveness is severely hindered by complex acoustic distortions, environmental volatility and the scarcity of fine-annotated data, which limit the success of standard deep learning approaches. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel quasi-static in situ learning paradigm for underwater acoustic target detection (UATD). The hybrid methodology integrates scene priors into a lightweight deep learning detector by incorporating explicit probability weighting based on echo-intensity statistics and acoustic attenuation compensation. By using these models for pixel-wise image enhancement and fusing statistical descriptors with deep learning predictions at the score level, the framework dynamically adapts to in situ environmental contexts during quasi-static operational tranches. Experimental evaluations on the UATD dataset demonstrate that this in situ adaptation significantly enhances overall detection performance, achieving an F1-score of 0.865 for our approach, an 8.1% improvement over the baseline YOLOv12n, with only a 2.1 G increase in FLOPs, while outperforming YOLOv12x (F1 = 0.844) with 95% fewer FLOPs. Ultimately, this paradigm overcomes the limitations of purely deep learning-based methods, offering a robust and interpretable solution tailored for practical AUV deployment.