Abstract:With the continuous growth of the demand for marine resource development and national defense security, the importance of underwater target recognition technology has become increasingly prominent. This paper systematically studies the underwater target recognition technology based on deep learning, and analyzes the performance characteristics of the current mainstream algorithms and their improvement methods. Firstly, this paper outlines the challenges faced by underwater target recognition, and provides a detailed introduction to the Two-Stage algorithm and One-Stage algorithm based on deep learning. This paper focuses on comparing the performance of algorithms such as Faster R-CNN, the YOLO series, and target detection algorithms based on Transformer (such as DETR and its improved algorithms) in terms of recognition accuracy, real-time performance, and robustness. In addition, this paper also explores the application of the attention mechanism and multi-scale feature fusion technology in underwater target recognition. These technologies can effectively improve the generalization ability and recognition efficiency of the model. Finally, this paper summarizes the performance of different algorithms on standard datasets and self-built underwater datasets, and puts forward prospects for future research directions.