In order to develop an underwater sea cucumber collecting robot, it is necessary to use the machine vision method to realize sea cucumber recognition and location. An identification and location method of underwater sea cucumber based on improved You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) is proposed. Due to the low contrast between sea cucumbers and the underwater environment, the Multi-Scale Retinex with Color Restoration (MSRCR) algorithm was introduced to process the images to enhance the

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... t. In order to improve the recognition precision and efficiency, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is added. In order to make small target recognition more precise, the Detect layer was added to the Head network of YOLOv5s. The improved YOLOv5s model and YOLOv5s, YOLOv4, and Faster-RCNN identified the same image set; the experimental results show improved YOLOv5 recognition precision level and confidence level, especially for small target recognition, which is excellent and better than other models. Compared to the other three models, the improved YOLOv5s has higher precision and detection time. Compared with the YOLOv5s, the precision and recall rate of the improved YOLOv5s model are improved by 9% and 11.5%, respectively.