The random cropping data augmentation method is widely used to train convolutional neural network (CNN)-based target detectors to detect targets in optical images (e.g., COCO datasets). It can expand the scale of the dataset dozens of times while consuming only a small amount of calculations when training the neural network detector. In addition, random cropping can also greatly enhance the spatial robustness of the model, because it can make the same target appear in different positions of the sample image. Nowadays, random cropping and random flipping have become the standard configuration for those tasks with limited training data, which makes it natural to introduce them into the training of CNN-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image ship detectors. However, in this paper, we show that the introduction of traditional random cropping methods directly in the training of the CNN-based SAR image ship detector may generate a lot of noise in the gradient during back propagation, which hurts the detection performance. In order to eliminate the noise in the training gradient, a simple and effective training method based on feature map mask is proposed. Experiments prove that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the gradient noise introduced by random cropping and significantly improve the detection performance under a variety of evaluation indicators without increasing inference cost.
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