CAA-YOLO: Combined-Attention-Augmented YOLO for Infrared Ocean Ships Detection

Infrared ocean ships detection still faces great challenges due to the low signal-to-noise ratio and low spatial resolution resulting in a severe lack of texture details for small infrared targets, as well as the distribution of the extremely multiscale ships. In this paper, we propose a CAA-YOLO to alleviate the problems. In this study, to highlight and preserve features of small targets, we apply a high-resolution feature layer (P2) to better use shallow details and the location information. In order to suppress the shallow noise of the P2 layer and further enhance the feature extraction capability, we introduce a TA module into the backbone. Moreover, we design a new feature fusion method to capture the long-range contextual information of small targets and propose a combined attention mechanism to enhance the ability of the feature fusion while suppressing the noise interference caused by the shallow feature layers. We conduct a detailed study of the algorithm based on a marine infrared dataset to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm, in which the AP and AR of small targets increase by 5.63% and 9.01%, respectively, and the mAP increases by 3.4% compared to that of YOLOv5.