An Inshore SAR Ship Detection Method Based on Ghost Feature Extraction and Cross-Scale Interaction

Ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images using a convolutional neural network (CNN) has become a hotspot. However, dense multisize ship targets in inshore scenes, the proximity of ship targets to man-made targets, and datasets containing only one class limit the performance of ship detection methods. In pursuit of attaining heightened performance, most existing methods endeavor to augment the number of parameters and enhance network complexity. To address these problems, this letter proposes an anchor-free ghost feature extraction and cross-scale interaction network (GFECSI-Net), which improves detection performance through an efficient implementation, thereby avoiding the increase in the number of parameters or network complexity. First, to enhance the capability of feature extraction for ship targets, a multiscale adaptive feature pyramid network (MSAFPN) is proposed to realize intensive information interaction and cross-scale feature fusion between different feature maps. Meanwhile, a selective efficient channel attention module (SECAM) is designed to enable the network to prioritize channels that better characterize ship targets. Besides, a GPU-efficient backbone for generating ghost feature maps and a task alignment detection head are integrated into GFECSI-Net. Comparison results with nine state-of-the-art CNN methods on a high-resolution SAR image dataset (HRSID) and a large-scale multiclass SAR target dataset (MSAR-1.0) indicate that GFECSI-Net achieves superior detection performance in F1-Score and mAP with a small number of parameters.

Automated summary

This letter proposes an anchor-free ghost feature extraction and cross-scale interaction network (GFECSI-Net) for ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. It achieves improved detection performance without increasing the number of parameters or network complexity. The use of a multiscale adaptive feature pyramid network (MSAFPN), a selective efficient channel attention module (SECAM), and a GPU-efficient backbone contributes to the superior detection performance of GFECSI-Net.