A Lightweight Model for Ship Detection and Recognition in Complex-Scene SAR Images

SAR ship detection and recognition are important components of the application of SAR data interpretation, allowing for the continuous, reliable, and efficient monitoring of maritime ship targets, in view of the present situation of SAR interpretation applications. On the one hand, because of the lack of high-quality datasets, most existing research on SAR ships is focused on target detection. Additionally, there have been few studies on integrated ship detection and recognition in complex SAR images. On the other hand, the development of deep learning technology promotes research on the SAR image intelligent interpretation algorithm to some extent. However, most existing algorithms only focus on target recognition performance and ignore the model’s size and computational efficiency. Aiming to solve the above problems, a lightweight model for ship detection and recognition in complex-scene SAR images is proposed in this paper. Firstly, in order to comprehensively improve the detection performance and deployment capability, this paper applies the YOLOv5-n lightweight model as the baseline algorithm. Secondly, we redesign and optimize the pyramid pooling structure to effectively enhance the target feature extraction efficiency and improve the algorithm’s operation speed. Meanwhile, to suppress the influence of complex background interference and ships’ distribution, we integrate different attention mechanism into the target feature extraction layer. In addition, to improve the detection and recognition performance of densely parallel ships, we optimize the structure of the model’s prediction layer by adding an angular classification module. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments on the newly released complex-scene SAR image ship detection and recognition dataset, named the SRSDDv1.0 dataset. The experimental results show that the minimum size of the model proposed in this paper is only 1.92 M parameters and 4.52 MB of model memory, which can achieve an excellent F1-Score performance of 61.26 and an FPS performance of 68.02 on the SRSDDv1.0 dataset.