volume | PIER Journals

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection plays a significant role in ocean monitoring. However, the current SAR ship detection methods face limitations in detecting small and dense ships. To address these issues, a novel SAR ship detection method based on multi-scale feature cross-fusion (MFCNet) is proposed in this paper. In the proposed model, a feature extraction network with a spatial fusion attention mechanism (FESNet) is designed to improve the capability of the backbone network in feature extraction. A multi-intersection spatial pyramid pooling (MISPP) module is proposed to expand the receptive field and enhance the semantic information. Furthermore, a feature cross-fusion network (FCFNet) is designed to comprehensively integrate features of different scales for enhancing SAR ship detection performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves high detection performance on the SSDD and HRSID datasets, providing more reliable technical support for ship detection in maritime environments.

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Dr. Xiao-Zhen Ren

Dr. Peiyuan Zhou

Dr. Gang Liu