Sea ice detection network for icebreakers in polar environments with attention-based deeplabv3+ architecture

Abstract

Shipborne sea ice detection aboard icebreakers plays a paramount role in polar navigation. The continuous evolution of deep learning semantic segmentation networks has promoted the advancement of sea ice detection tasks. At this stage, there are relatively few studies on shipboard sea ice detection, and the accuracy of polar sea ice detection will be reduced due to problems such as blurred sea fog and indistinct boundaries. In this study, a shipboard sea ice detection dataset is constructed, and a sea ice detection method that combines multi-branch attention feature alignment and multi-scale feature extraction is proposed. The heterogeneous receptive field enhancement atrous spatial convolution pooling pyramid module is designed, and the feature alignment module based on the attention mechanism is constructed, which strengthens the model’s extraction of sea ice features and elevates representation performance. Experimental results underscore the heightened precision of our approach in sea ice detection, to some extent alleviating the issue of missed detections in new ice. It constitutes a positive contribution towards advancing shipborne sea ice detection in polar environments.