PSFNet: Efficient Detection of SAR Image Based on Petty-Specialized Feature Aggregation

With the rapid development of deep learning, convolutional neural networks have achieved milestones in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image object detection. However, object detection in SAR images is still a great challenge due to the difficulty in distinguishing targets from complex backgrounds. At the same time, most of the targets in SAR images are small and unevenly distributed, which makes it challenging to extract sufficient feature information. To solve these issues mentioned above, an efficient object detection network for SAR images based on Swin transformer and YOLOv7 is proposed in this article. First, we design a novel feature aggregation module Petty-specialized feature aggregation (PS-FPN) to enrich small targets’ semantic and spatial features while keeping the model lightweight. PS-FPN module uses the fusion of deep and shallow features by using cross-layer feature aggregation and single-branch feature aggregation to enhance the detection of small targets. Second, a novel attention mechanism strategy mix-attention is proposed to find more attention regions. Finally, we add one more prediction head to extract shallow features that effectively preserve small targets’ feature information. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, extensive experiments are carried out on several challenging SAR image datasets. The results show that, compared with other state-of-the-art detectors, the proposed method can achieve significant performance based on lightweight detection.