SAR Ship Detection in Complex Scenes Based on Adaptive Anchor Assignment and IOU Supervise

This study aims to address the unreasonable assignment of positive and negative samples and poor localization quality in ship detection in complex scenes. Therefore, in this study, a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) ship detection network (A3-IOUS-Net) based on adaptive anchor assignment and Intersection over Union (IOU) supervise in complex scenes is proposed. First, an adaptive anchor assignment mechanism is proposed, where a probability distribution model is established to adaptively assign anchors as positive and negative samples to enhance the ship samples’ learning ability in complex scenes. Then, an IOU supervise mechanism is proposed, which adds an IOU prediction branch in the prediction head to supervise the localization quality of detection boxes, allowing the network to accurately locate the SAR ship targets in complex scenes. Furthermore, a coordinate attention module is introduced into the prediction branch to suppress the background clutter interference and improve the SAR ship detection accuracy. The experimental results on the open SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) show that the Average Precision (AP) of A3-IOUS-Net in complex scenes is 82.04%, superior to the other 15 comparison models