scholarly journals SAR Ship Detection Based on Improved Libra RetinaNet

Author(s):  
Haomiao Liu ◽  
Haizhou Xu ◽  
Lei Zhang ◽  
Weigang Lu ◽  
Fei Yang ◽  
...  

Maritime ship monitoring plays an important role in maritime transportation. Fast and accurate detection of maritime ship is the key to maritime ship monitoring. The main sources of marine ship images are optical images and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Different from natural images, SAR images are independent to daylight and weather conditions. Traditional ship detection methods of SAR images mainly depend on the statistical distribution of sea clutter, which leads to poor robustness. As a deep learning detector, RetinaNet can break this obstacle, and the problem of imbalance on feature level and objective level can be further solved by combining with Libra R-CNN algorithm. In this paper, we modify the feature fusion part of Libra RetinaNet by adding a bottom-up path augmentation structure to better preserve the low-level feature information, and we expand the dataset through style transfer. We evaluate our method on the publicly available SAR dataset of ship detection with complex backgrounds. The experimental results show that the improved Libra RetinaNet can effectively detect multi-scale ships through expansion of the dataset, with an average accuracy of 97.38%.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (21) ◽  
pp. 4384
Author(s):  
Danpei Zhao ◽  
Chunbo Zhu ◽  
Jing Qi ◽  
Xinhu Qi ◽  
Zhenhua Su ◽  
...  

This paper takes account of the fact that there is a lack of consideration for imaging methods and target characteristics of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images among existing instance segmentation methods designed for optical images. Thus, we propose a method for SAR ship instance segmentation based on the synergistic attention mechanism which not only improves the performance of ship detection with multi-task branches but also provides pixel-level contours for subsequent applications such as orientation or category determination. The proposed method—SA R-CNN—presents a synergistic attention strategy at the image, semantic, and target level with the following module corresponding to the different stages in the whole process of the instance segmentation framework. The global attention module (GAM), semantic attention module(SAM), and anchor attention module (AAM) were constructed for feature extraction, feature fusion, and target location, respectively, for multi-scale ship targets under complex background conditions. Compared with several state-of-the-art methods, our method reached 68.7 AP in detection and 56.5 AP in segmentation on the HRSID dataset, and showed 91.5 AP in the detection task on the SSDD dataset.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Jimin Yu ◽  
Guangyu Zhou ◽  
Shangbo Zhou ◽  
Maowei Qin

It is very difficult to detect multi-scale synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ships, especially under complex backgrounds. Traditional constant false alarm rate methods are cumbersome in manual design and weak in migration capabilities. Based on deep learning, researchers have introduced methods that have shown good performance in order to get better detection results. However, the majority of these methods have a huge network structure and many parameters which greatly restrict the application and promotion. In this paper, a fast and lightweight detection network, namely FASC-Net, is proposed for multi-scale SAR ship detection under complex backgrounds. The proposed FASC-Net is mainly composed of ASIR-Block, Focus-Block, SPP-Block, and CAPE-Block. Specifically, without losing information, Focus-Block is placed at the forefront of FASC-Net for the first down-sampling of input SAR images at first. Then, ASIR-Block continues to down-sample the feature maps and use a small number of parameters for feature extraction. After that, the receptive field of the feature maps is increased by SPP-Block, and then CAPE-Block is used to perform feature fusion and predict targets of different scales on different feature maps. Based on this, a novel loss function is designed in the present paper in order to train the FASC-Net. The detection performance and generalization ability of FASC-Net have been demonstrated by a series of comparative experiments on the SSDD dataset, SAR-Ship-Dataset, and HRSID dataset, from which it is obvious that FASC-Net has outstanding detection performance on the three datasets and is superior to the existing excellent ship detection methods.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuanyuan Wang ◽  
Chao Wang ◽  
Hong Zhang ◽  
Yingbo Dong ◽  
Sisi Wei

Independent of daylight and weather conditions, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is widely applied to detect ships in marine surveillance. The shapes of ships are multi-scale in SAR imagery due to multi-resolution imaging modes and their various shapes. Conventional ship detection methods are highly dependent on the statistical models of sea clutter or the extracted features, and their robustness need to be strengthened. Being an automatic learning representation, the RetinaNet object detector, one kind of deep learning model, is proposed to crack this obstacle. Firstly, feature pyramid networks (FPN) are used to extract multi-scale features for both ship classification and location. Then, focal loss is used to address the class imbalance and to increase the importance of the hard examples during training. There are 86 scenes of Chinese Gaofen-3 Imagery at four resolutions, i.e., 3 m, 5 m, 8 m, and 10 m, used to evaluate our approach. Two Gaofen-3 images and one Constellation of Small Satellite for Mediterranean basin Observation (Cosmo-SkyMed) image are used to evaluate the robustness. The experimental results reveal that (1) RetinaNet not only can efficiently detect multi-scale ships but also has a high detection accuracy; (2) compared with other object detectors, RetinaNet achieves more than a 96% mean average precision (mAP). These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nengyuan Liu ◽  
Zongjie Cao ◽  
Zongyong Cui ◽  
Yiming Pi ◽  
Sihang Dang

The classic ship detection methods in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images suffer from an extreme variance of ship scale. Generating a set of ship proposals before detection operation can effectively alleviate the multi-scale problem. In order to construct a scale-independent proposal generator for SAR images, we suggest four characteristics of ships in SAR images and the corresponding four procedures in this paper. Based on these characteristics and procedures, we put forward a framework to explore multi-scale ship proposals. The designed framework mainly contains two stages: hierarchical grouping and proposal scoring. Firstly, we extract edges, superpixels and strong scattering components from SAR images. The ship proposals are obtained at hierarchical grouping stage by combining the strong scattering components with superpixel grouping. Considering the difference of edge density and the completeness and tightness of contour, we obtain the scores to measure the confidence that a proposal contains a ship. Finally, the ranking proposals are obtained. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the four procedures. Our method achieves 0.70 the average best overlap (ABO) score, 0.59 the area under the curve (AUC) score and 0.85 best recall on a challenging dataset. In addition, the recall of our method on three scale subsets are all above 0.80. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the approaches previously used for SAR images.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Yao Chen ◽  
Tao Duan ◽  
Changyuan Wang ◽  
Yuanyuan Zhang ◽  
Mo Huang

Ship detection on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery has many valuable applications for both civil and military fields and has received extraordinary attention in recent years. The traditional detection methods are insensitive to multiscale ships and usually time-consuming, results in low detection accuracy and limitation for real-time processing. To balance the accuracy and speed, an end-to-end ship detection method for complex inshore and offshore scenes based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is proposed in this paper. First, the SAR images are divided into different grids, and the anchor boxes are predefined based on the responsible grids for dense ship prediction. Then, Darknet-53 with residual units is adopted as a backbone to extract features, and a top-down pyramid structure is added for multiscale feature fusion with concatenation. By this means, abundant hierarchical features containing both spatial and semantic information are extracted. Meanwhile, the strategies such as soft non-maximum suppression (Soft-NMS), mix-up and mosaic data augmentation, multiscale training, and hybrid optimization are used for performance enhancement. Besides, the model is trained from scratch to avoid learning objective bias of pretraining. The proposed one-stage method adopts end-to-end inference by a single network, so the detection speed can be guaranteed due to the concise paradigm. Extensive experiments are performed on the public SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD), and the results show that the method can detect both inshore and offshore ships with higher accuracy than other mainstream methods, yielding the accuracy with an average of 95.52%, and the detection speed is quite fast with about 72 frames per second (FPS). The actual Sentinel-1 and Gaofen-3 data are utilized for verification, and the detection results also show the effectiveness and robustness of the method.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (23) ◽  
pp. 8146
Author(s):  
Haozhen Zhu ◽  
Yao Xie ◽  
Huihui Huang ◽  
Chen Jing ◽  
Yingjiao Rong ◽  
...  

With the wide application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a variety of ship detection methods based on CNNs in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images were proposed, but there are still two main challenges: (1) Ship detection requires high real-time performance, and a certain detection speed should be ensured while improving accuracy; (2) The diversity of ships in SAR images requires more powerful multi-scale detectors. To address these issues, a SAR ship detector called Duplicate Bilateral YOLO (DB-YOLO) is proposed in this paper, which is composed of a Feature Extraction Network (FEN), Duplicate Bilateral Feature Pyramid Network (DB-FPN) and Detection Network (DN). Firstly, a single-stage network is used to meet the need of real-time detection, and the cross stage partial (CSP) block is used to reduce the redundant parameters. Secondly, DB-FPN is designed to enhance the fusion of semantic and spatial information. In view of the ships in SAR image are mainly distributed with small-scale targets, the distribution of parameters and computation values between FEN and DB-FPN in different feature layers is redistributed to solve the multi-scale detection. Finally, the bounding boxes and confidence scores are given through the detection head of YOLO. In order to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of DB-YOLO, comparative experiments with the other six state-of-the-art methods (Faster R-CNN, Cascade R-CNN, Libra R-CNN, FCOS, CenterNet and YOLOv5s) on two SAR ship datasets, i.e., SSDD and HRSID, are performed. The experimental results show that the AP50 of DB-YOLO reaches 97.8% on SSDD and 94.4% on HRSID, respectively. DB-YOLO meets the requirement of real-time detection (48.1 FPS) and is superior to other methods in the experiments.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 2558
Author(s):  
Lei Yu ◽  
Haoyu Wu ◽  
Zhi Zhong ◽  
Liying Zheng ◽  
Qiuyue Deng ◽  
...  

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an active earth observation system with a certain surface penetration capability and can be employed to observations all-day and all-weather. Ship detection using SAR is of great significance to maritime safety and port management. With the wide application of in-depth learning in ordinary images and good results, an increasing number of detection algorithms began entering the field of remote sensing images. SAR image has the characteristics of small targets, high noise, and sparse targets. Two-stage detection methods, such as faster regions with convolution neural network (Faster RCNN), have good results when applied to ship target detection based on the SAR graph, but their efficiency is low and their structure requires many computing resources, so they are not suitable for real-time detection. One-stage target detection methods, such as single shot multibox detector (SSD), make up for the shortage of the two-stage algorithm in speed but lack effective use of information from different layers, so it is not as good as the two-stage algorithm in small target detection. We propose the two-way convolution network (TWC-Net) based on a two-way convolution structure and use multiscale feature mapping to process SAR images. The two-way convolution module can effectively extract the feature from SAR images, and the multiscale mapping module can effectively process shallow and deep feature information. TWC-Net can avoid the loss of small target information during the feature extraction, while guaranteeing good perception of a large target by the deep feature map. We tested the performance of our proposed method using a common SAR ship dataset SSDD. The experimental results show that our proposed method has a higher recall rate and precision, and the F-Measure is 93.32%. It has smaller parameters and memory consumption than other methods and is superior to other methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 328
Author(s):  
Wenkai Liang ◽  
Yan Wu ◽  
Ming Li ◽  
Yice Cao ◽  
Xin Hu

The classification of high-resolution (HR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is of great importance for SAR scene interpretation and application. However, the presence of intricate spatial structural patterns and complex statistical nature makes SAR image classification a challenging task, especially in the case of limited labeled SAR data. This paper proposes a novel HR SAR image classification method, using a multi-scale deep feature fusion network and covariance pooling manifold network (MFFN-CPMN). MFFN-CPMN combines the advantages of local spatial features and global statistical properties and considers the multi-feature information fusion of SAR images in representation learning. First, we propose a Gabor-filtering-based multi-scale feature fusion network (MFFN) to capture the spatial pattern and get the discriminative features of SAR images. The MFFN belongs to a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). To make full use of a large amount of unlabeled data, the weights of each layer of MFFN are optimized by unsupervised denoising dual-sparse encoder. Moreover, the feature fusion strategy in MFFN can effectively exploit the complementary information between different levels and different scales. Second, we utilize a covariance pooling manifold network to extract further the global second-order statistics of SAR images over the fusional feature maps. Finally, the obtained covariance descriptor is more distinct for various land covers. Experimental results on four HR SAR images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and achieve promising results over other related algorithms.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenping Ma ◽  
Hui Yang ◽  
Yue Wu ◽  
Yunta Xiong ◽  
Tao Hu ◽  
...  

In this paper, a novel change detection approach based on multi-grained cascade forest(gcForest) and multi-scale fusion for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed. It detectsthe changed and unchanged areas of the images by using the well-trained gcForest. Most existingchange detection methods need to select the appropriate size of the image block. However, thesingle size image block only provides a part of the local information, and gcForest cannot achieve agood effect on the image representation learning ability. Therefore, the proposed approach choosesdifferent sizes of image blocks as the input of gcForest, which can learn more image characteristicsand reduce the influence of the local information of the image on the classification result as well.In addition, in order to improve the detection accuracy of those pixels whose gray value changesabruptly, the proposed approach combines gradient information of the difference image with theprobability map obtained from the well-trained gcForest. Therefore, the image edge information canbe enhanced and the accuracy of edge detection can be improved by extracting the image gradientinformation. Experiments on four data sets indicate that the proposed approach outperforms otherstate-of-the-art algorithms.


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