SAR Image Ship Target Detection Based on Receptive Field Enhancement Module and Cross-Layer Feature Fusion

Abstract

The interference of natural factors on the sea surface often results in a blurred background in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) ship images, and the detection difficulty is further increased when different types of ships are densely docked together in nearshore scenes. To tackle these hurdles, this paper proposes a target detection model based on YOLOv5s, named YOLO-CLF. Initially, we constructed a Receptive Field Enhancement Module (RFEM) to improve the model’s performance in handling blurred background images. Subsequently, considering the situation of dense multi-size ship images, we designed a Cross-Layer Fusion Feature Pyramid Network (CLF-FPN) to aggregate multi-scale features, thereby enhancing detection accuracy. Finally, we introduce a Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD) metric to replace the commonly used Intersection over Union (IoU) metric, aiming to improve the detection capability of small targets. Experimental findings show that the enhanced algorithm attains an Average Precision (AP50) of 98.2% and 90.4% on the SSDD and HRSID datasets, respectively, which is an increase of 1.3% and 2.2% compared to the baseline model YOLOv5s. Simultaneously, it has also achieved a significant performance advantage in comparison to some other models.