ATSD: Anchor-Free Two-Stage Ship Detection Based on Feature Enhancement in SAR Images

In recent years, significant strides have been made in the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection through the application of deep learning techniques. These advanced methods have substantially improved the accuracy of ship detection. Nonetheless, SAR images present distinct challenges, including complex backgrounds, small ship targets, and noise interference, thereby rendering the detectors particularly demanding. In this paper, we introduce LRTransDet, a real-time SAR ship detector. LRTransDet leverages a lightweight vision transformer (ViT) and a multi-scale feature fusion neck to address these challenges effectively. First, our model implements a lightweight backbone that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers, thus enabling it to simultaneously capture both local and global features from input SAR images. Moreover, we boost the model’s efficiency by incorporating the faster weighted feature fusion (Faster-WF2) module and coordinate attention (CA) mechanism within the feature fusion neck. These components optimize computational resources while maintaining the model’s performance. To overcome the challenge of detecting small ship targets in SAR images, we refine the original loss function and use the normalized Wasserstein distance (NWD) metric and the intersection over union (IoU) scheme. This combination improves the detector’s ability to efficiently detect small targets. To prove the performance of our proposed model, we conducted experiments on four challenging datasets (the SSDD, the SAR-Ship Dataset, the HRSID, and the LS-SSDD-v1.0). The results demonstrate that our model surpasses both general object detectors and state-of-the-art SAR ship detectors in terms of detection accuracy (97.8% on the SSDD and 93.9% on the HRSID) and speed (74.6 FPS on the SSDD and 75.8 FPS on the HRSID), all while demanding 3.07 M parameters. Additionally, we conducted a series of ablation experiments to illustrate the impact of the EfficientViT, the Faster-WF2 module, the CA mechanism, and the NWD metric on multi-scale feature fusion and detection performance.

Section: Methods Map (%) Parameters (M) Flops (G)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sar Ship-detection Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

LRTransDet: A Real-Time SAR Ship-Detection Network with Lightweight ViT and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

Feng,

Lun,

Wang

et al. 2023

“…Nevertheless, due to the diversity of ship scales and strong clutter interference in large-scale SAR scenarios, it is infeasible to directly transfer existing detection models from computer vision to SAR ship detection. To overcome these challenging problems, scholars have put much effort into deep learning-based ship detection and proposed many ship-detection algorithms with impressive results [23][24][25][26][27]. For instance, Cui et al developed a new detection framework named dense attention pyramid network to achieve multi-scale dense SAR ship detection [28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Level Feature-Refinement Anchor-Free Framework with Consistent Label-Assignment Mechanism for Ship Detection in SAR Imagery

Zhou,

Wang,

Ren

et al. 2024

Deep learning-based ship-detection methods have recently achieved impressive results in the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) community. However, numerous challenging issues affecting ship detection, such as multi-scale characteristics of the ship, clutter interference, and densely arranged ships in complex inshore, have not been well solved so far. Therefore, this article puts forward a novel SAR ship-detection method called multi-level feature-refinement anchor-free framework with a consistent label-assignment mechanism, which is capable of boosting ship-detection performance in complex scenes. First, considering that SAR ship detection is susceptible to complex background interference, we develop a stepwise feature-refinement backbone network to refine the position and contour of the ship object. Next, we devise an adjacent feature-refined pyramid network following the backbone network. The adjacent feature-refined pyramid network consists of the sub-pixel sampling-based adjacent feature-fusion sub-module and adjacent feature-localization enhancement sub-module, which can improve the detection capability of multi-scale objects by mitigating multi-scale high-level semantic loss and enhancing low-level localization features. Finally, to solve the problems of unbalanced positive and negative samples and densely arranged ship detection, we propose a consistent label-assignment mechanism based on consistent feature scale constraints to assign more appropriate and consistent labels to samples. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on three public datasets, i.e., SAR Ship-Detection Dataset (SSDD), High-Resolution SAR Image Dataset (HRSID), and SAR-Ship-Dataset illustrate that the proposed method is superior to many state-of-the-art SAR ship-detection methods.

“…The rapid advancement of deep learning has promoted the presence of many excellent object-detection works [1,2]. For instance, Yang et al utilized a Dense Feature Pyramid Network (DFPN) to enhance detection [3], and Yao et al introduced an anchor-free two-stage detection method [4]. Object detection works based on RGB exhibit good performance in ordinary surroundings [5,6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Misaligned RGB-Infrared Object Detection via Adaptive Dual-Discrepancy Calibration

He,

Wu,

Ngan

et al. 2023

Object detection based on RGB and infrared images has emerged as a crucial research area in computer vision, and the synergy of RGB-Infrared ensures the robustness of object-detection algorithms under varying lighting conditions. However, the RGB-IR image pairs captured typically exhibit spatial misalignment due to sensor discrepancies, leading to compromised localization performance. Furthermore, since the inconsistent distribution of deep features from the two modalities, directly fusing multi-modal features will weaken the feature difference between the object and the background, therefore interfering with the RGB-Infrared object-detection performance. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive dual-discrepancy calibration network (ADCNet) for misaligned RGB-Infrared object detection, including spatial discrepancy and domain-discrepancy calibration. Specifically, the spatial discrepancy calibration module conducts an adaptive affine transformation to achieve spatial alignment of features. Then, the domain-discrepancy calibration module separately aligns object and background features from different modalities, making the distribution of the object and background of the fusion feature easier to distinguish, therefore enhancing the effectiveness of RGB-Infrared object detection. Our ADCNet outperforms the baseline by 3.3% and 2.5% in mAP50 on the FLIR and misaligned M3FD datasets, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the superiorities of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art approaches.