SAR Remote Sensing Image Ship Detection Method NanoDet Based on Visual Saliency

• Published in: Journal of radars = Lei da xue bao Vol. 10; no. 6; pp. 885 - 894
• Main Authors: Fangjian LIU, Yuan LI
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: China Science Publishing & Media Ltd. (CSPM) 01.12.2021
• Subjects: deep learning; lightweight network; sar image; ship detection; visual saliency
• ISSN: 2095-283X
• DOI: 10.12000/JR21105

In the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing image, ships are visually significant targets on the sea surface. Because they are made of metal, thus the backscatter is strong, while the sea surface is smooth and the backscatter is weak. However, the large-width SAR remote sensing image has a complicated sea background, and the features of various ship targets are quite different. To solve this problem, a SAR remote sensing image ship detection model called NanoDet is proposed. NanoDet is based on visual saliency. First, the image samples are divided into various scene categories using an automatic clustering algorithm. Second, differentiated saliency detection is performed for images in various scenes. Finally, the optimized lightweight network model, NanoDet, is used to perform feature learning on the training samples added with the saliency maps, so that the system model can achieve fast and high-precision ship detection effects. This method is helpful for the real-time application of SAR images. The lightweight model is conducive to hardware transplantation in the future.This study conducts experiments based on the public data set SSDD and AIR-SARship-2.0, and the experiments results verify the effectiveness of our approach.