Underwater object detection algorithm based on feature enhancement and progressive dynamic aggregation strategy

•Firstly, a new feature enhancement gating module is designed to extract the key information contained in features from different dimensions more comprehensively;•Then, a feature dynamic fusion module is designed to aggregate the features of adjacent layers, which can establish the relationship between the object scale of the input image and feature fusion, and dynamically learn the fusion weight according to the object scale;•Finally, this paper proposes a fast spatial pyramid mixed pooling module (FMSPP) composed of mixed pooling layers of the same size to replaces the spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) in the original yolov5s model, so that the network can obtain stronger texture and contour feature description ability.