Improved Ship Detection Algorithm Based on YOLOX for SAR Outline Enhancement Image

Sen Li, Xiongjun Fu*, Jian Dong

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

34 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection based on deep learning has the advantages of high accuracy and end-to-end processing, which has received more and more attention. However, SAR ship detection faces many problems, such as fuzzy ship contour, complex background, large scale difference and dense distribution of small targets. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a SAR ship detection method with ultra lightweight and high detection accuracy based on YOLOX. Aiming at the problem of speckle noise and blurred ship contour caused by the special imaging mechanism of SAR, a SAR ship feature enhancement method based on high frequency sub-band channel fusion which makes full use of contour information is proposed. Aiming at the requirement of light-weight detection algorithms for micro-SAR platforms such as small unmanned aerial vehicle and the defect of spatial pooling pyramid structure damaging ship contour features, an ultra-lightweight and high performance detection backbone based on Ghost Cross Stage Partial (GhostCSP) and lightweight spatial dilation convolution pyramid (LSDP) is designed. Aiming at the characteristics of ship scale diversity and unbalanced distribution of channel feature information after contour enhancement in SAR images, four feature layers are used to fuse contextual semantic information and channel attention mechanism is used for feature enhancement, and finally the improved ship target detection method based on YOLOX (ImYOLOX) is formed. Experimental tests on the SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) show that the proposed method achieves an average precision of 97.45% with a parameter size of 3.31 MB and a model size of 4.35 MB, and its detection performance is ahead of most current SAR ship detection algorithms.

Original languageEnglish
Article number4070
JournalRemote Sensing
Volume14
Issue number16
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2022

Keywords

  • SAR ship detection
  • YOLOX
  • deep learning
  • high average precision
  • lightweight network

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