A lightweight object detection network based on YOLOv5 for SAR image

Remote sensing image target detection is one of the key technologies in the field of intelligent interpretation of remote sensing images, and it has significant application value in various areas, including military defense. When performing remote sensing image object detection on airborne and spaceborne platforms, the vast amount of remote sensing data processing and limited computational resources impose high real-time requirements on the object detection algorithms. This paper designs a lightweight object detection network model named YOLOv5-tiny, based on the existing deep learning network detection model YOLOv5s, and deploys it on the Jetson TX2 development board for training and testing. Experimental results show that the proposed YOLOv5-tiny model, when tested on the SAR-AIRcraft-1.0 with an input image size of 640x640, is 10 times smaller than YOLOv5s; it has a computational cost of 5.2 GFLOPs, which is 1/5 of YOLOv5s, and the processing time for a single image is reduced to half that of YOLOv5s, with only a 0.1% decrease in accuracy.