SAR Image Target Detection based on Attention YOLOv4

Abstract

Target Detection in synthetic aperture radar(SAR) image is critical for military and national defense. In this paper, we propose YOLOv4-Attention architecture which adds attention modules to YOLOv4 backbone architecture to complement the feature extraction ability for SAR target detection with high accuracy. For training and testing our framework, we present new SAR embedding datasets based on MSTAR SAR public datasets which are about poor environments for target detection such as various clutter, crowded objects, various object size, close to buildings, and weakness of signal-to-clutter ratio. Experiments show that our Attention YOLOv4 architecture outperforms original YOLOv4 architecture in SAR image target detection tasks in poor environments for target detection.