Quad-FPN: A Novel Quad Feature Pyramid Network for SAR Ship Detection

Ship detection from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is a fundamental and significant marine mission. It plays an important role in marine traffic control, marine fishery management, and marine rescue. Nevertheless, there are still some challenges hindering accuracy improvements of SAR ship detection, e.g., complex background interferences, multi-scale ship feature differences, and indistinctive small ship features. Therefore, to address these problems, a novel quad feature pyramid network (Quad-FPN) is proposed for SAR ship detection in this paper. Quad-FPN consists of four unique FPNs, i.e., a DEformable COnvolutional FPN (DE-CO-FPN), a Content-Aware Feature Reassembly FPN (CA-FR-FPN), a Path Aggregation Space Attention FPN (PA-SA-FPN), and a Balance Scale Global Attention FPN (BS-GA-FPN). To confirm the effectiveness of each FPN, extensive ablation studies are conducted. We conduct experiments on five open SAR ship detection datasets, i.e., SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD), Gaofen-SSDD, Sentinel-SSDD, SAR-Ship-Dataset, and high-resolution SAR images dataset (HRSID). Qualitative and quantitative experimental results jointly reveal Quad-FPN’s optimal SAR ship detection performance compared with the other 12 competitive state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN)-based SAR ship detectors. To confirm the excellent migration application capability of Quad-FPN, the actual ship detection in another two large-scene Sentinel-1 SAR images is conducted. Their satisfactory detection results indicate the practical application value of Quad-FPN in marine surveillance.