SAR image near-shore ship target detection method in complex background

ABSTRACT

Due to background clutter in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, the detection of dense ship targets suffers from a low detection rate, high false alarm rate, and high missed detection rate. To address this issue, an FSM-DFF-YOLOv5+Confluence algorithm is proposed in this paper for the detection of near-shore ship targets in SAR images with complex backgrounds. First, based on the YOLOv5 target detection algorithm, two improvements are made in the feature extraction network: feature refinement and multi-feature fusion; in the feature extraction network, deformable convolutional neural networks are adopted to change the position of the target sampling points of the convolution to improve the feature extraction capability of the target and the detection rate of ship targets in SAR images with a complex background; in the multi-feature fusion network structure, cascading and parallel pyramids are used in the multi-feature fusion network to realize feature fusion at different levels; the visual perceptual field of feature extraction is expanded by using null convolution to enhance the adaptability of the network to detect near-shore multi-scale ship targets with complex backgrounds and reduce the false alarm rate of ship target detection in SAR images with complex environments. In this way, the DFF-YOLOv5 near-shore ship target detection algorithm is established. Meanwhile, to address the problem of missed detection in near-shore dense ship target detection, this paper adds rectangular convolution kernels to the convolution of the feature extraction network to better realize the feature extraction of dense ship targets in SAR images with complex backgrounds. Besides, the Confluence algorithm instead of non-maximum suppression is used in the prediction stage. Through experiments on the constructed complex background near-shore ship detection dataset, it is indicated that the average accuracy of the FSM-DFF-YOLOv5+Confluence detection algorithm reaches 88.96%, and the recall rate reaches 88.80%.

KEYWORDS:

• Synthetic aperture radar
• target detection
• nearshore ship targets
• densely aligned ships
• deformable convolutional neural network

Acknowledgements

The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers and Academic Editors for providing valuable comments, which have been very beneficial for improving the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Conceptualization, Y.L. (Yonggang Li) and W.Z. (Weigang Zhu); methodology, Y.L. and C.L(Chenxuan Li); writing – original draft, Y.L. and C.L.; writing – review and editing, Y.L.,C.L.,W.Z and C.Z.(Chuangzhan Zeng). All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.