DSCANet: underwater acoustic target classification using the depthwise separable convolutional attention module

The technology for classifying and recognizing underwater targets is crucial for supporting underwater acoustic information countermeasures. The research focus is on the extraction and classification of features of underwater targets. Researchers have conducted an in-depth study from various perspectives. Due to the influence of ambient noise and various operating conditions of different targets, the signal-to-noise ratio of underwater acoustic signals is generally meager. Additionally, the components of these signals are complex, often requiring specific signal pre-processing techniques such as signal enhancement and decomposition. In current methods, there is a primary focus on extracting and classifying features of underwater acoustic signals after multi-step preprocessing. However, these methods do not effectively integrate feature extraction and classification. To address these limitations, we propose a new model called Depthwise Separable Convolutional Attention (DSCA) and use multiple instances of DSCA to construct a neural network, which we call DSCANet. The DSCANet integrates feature extraction and target classification for underwater acoustic targets. The ’target’ in our work should be mentioned as it refers to underwater sources of sound. The structure of DSCANet is unified and simple, and no specific pre-processing of the underwater acoustic signal is necessary. The DSCANet is trained and validated on ShipsEars, an open dataset. It achieves a classification accuracy of 93%, which is the highest in the contrast experiment.