CSEF-Net: Cross-Scale SAR Ship Detection Network Based on Efficient Receptive Field and Enhanced Hierarchical Fusion

Abstract

Ship detection using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is widely applied to marine monitoring, ship identification, and other intelligent maritime applications. It also improves shipping efficiency, reduces marine traffic accidents, and promotes marine resource development. Land reflection and sea clutter introduce noise into SAR imaging, making the ship features in the image less prominent, which makes the detection of multi-scale ship targets more difficult. Therefore, a cross-scale ship detection network for SAR images based on efficient receptive field and enhanced hierarchical fusion is proposed. In order to retain more information and lighten the weight of the network, an efficient receptive field feature extraction backbone network (ERFBNet) is designed, and the multi-channel coordinate attention mechanism (MCCA) is embedded to highlight the ship features. Then, an enhanced hierarchical feature fusion network (EHFNet) is proposed to better characterize the features by fusing information from lower and higher layers. Finally, the feature map is input into the detection head with improved bounding box loss function. Using SSDD and HRSID as experimental datasets, average accuracies of 97.3% and 90.6% were obtained, respectively, and the network performed well in most scenarios.