An Efficient Lightweight SAR Ship Target Detection Network with Improved Regression Loss Function and Enhanced Feature Information Expression

It is difficult to identify the ship images obtained by a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) due to the influence of dense ships, complex background and small target size, so a deep learning-based target detection algorithm was introduced to obtain better detection performance. However, in order to achieve excellent performance, most of the current target detection algorithms focus on building deep and high-width neural networks, resulting in bloated network structure and reduced detection speed, which is not conducive to the practical application of target detection algorithms. Thereby, an efficient lightweight network Efficient-YOLO for ship detection in complex situations is proposed in the present work. Firstly, a new regression loss function ECIOU is proposed to enhance the detection boxes localization accuracy and model convergence speed. Secondly, We propose the SCUPA module to enhance the multiplexing of picture feature information and the model generalization performance. Thirdly, The GCHE module is proposed to strengthen the network’s ability to extract feature information. At last, the effectiveness of our method is tested on the specialized ship dataset: SSDD and HRSID datasets. The results show that Efficient-YOLO outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms in accuracy, recall and detection speed, with smaller model complexity and model size