Shipdenet-18: An Only 1 Mb With Only 18 Convolution Layers Light-Weight Deep Learning Network For Sar Ship Detection

Abstract

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), many previous studies have already applied Deep Learning (DL) for ship detection from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. However, these network scale and model size are both rather huge, leading to more computation costs. As a result, ship detection speed is bound to decline due to more computation costs, and FPGA/DSP transplantation also becomes more challenging coming from huge mode size. Therefore, to solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel lightweight deep learning network for SAR ship detection named ShipDeNet-18 (only 18 convolution layers). Essentially, fewer layers and fewer kernels jointly contribute to ShipDeNet-18's light-weight characteristic. In addition, to compensate for the severe detection accuracy's sacrifice, we also propose a Deep and Shallow Feature Fusion Module (DSFF-Module) and a Feature Pyramid Module (FP-Module), which can effectively improve its detection accuracy. Experimental results on the open SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) reveal that ShipDeNet-18's detection speed is largely superior to the other state-of-the-art detectors, meanwhile its detection accuracy is only slightly inferior to others. ShipDeNet-18 is a brand-new deep learning network built from scratch, more light-weight than the other detectors, with fewer parameters (228,246), lower computation costs (456,042 FLOPs), and smaller model size (1 MB). It is of great value in some real-time SAR application, and is also convenient for future hardware transplantation (FPGA/DSP).