Small Ship Detection Based on Hybrid Anchor Structure and Feature Super-Resolution

Small ships in remote sensing images have blurred details and are difficult to detect. Existing algorithms usually detect small ships based on predefined anchors with different sizes. However, limited by the number of different sizes, it is difficult for anchor-based methods to match small ships of different sizes and structures during training, as they can easily cause misdetections. In this paper, we propose a hybrid anchor structure to generate region proposals for small ships, so as to take full advantage of both anchor-based methods with high localization accuracy and anchor-free methods with fewer misdetections. To unify the output evaluation and obtain the best output, a label reassignment strategy is proposed, which reassigns the sample labels according to the harmonic intersection-over-union (IoU) before and after regression. In addition, an adaptive feature pyramid structure is proposed to enhance the features of important locations on the feature map, so that the features of small ship targets are more prominent and easier to identify. Moreover, feature super-resolution technology is introduced for the region of interest (RoI) features of small ships to generate super-resolution feature representations with a small computational cost, as well as generative adversarial training to improve the realism of super-resolution features. Based on the super-resolution feature, ship proposals are further classified and regressed by using super-resolution features to obtain more accurate detection results. Detailed ablation and comparison experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.