GTO-YOLO11n: YOLOv11n-Based Efficient Target Detection in Ship Remote Sensing Imagery

Accurate and efficient ship detection in remote sensing imagery is a key enabler of intelligent maritime surveillance operations, supporting real-time decision-making in search and rescue, traffic management, and maritime law enforcement. However, remote ship images pose unique challenges for detection. These include densely distributed targets, complex sea-land backgrounds, large aspect ratios, diverse ship geometries, and high color similarity between ships and their surroundings. To address these issues under the computational constraints of unmanned aerial platforms, we propose GTO-YOLO11n, an enhanced YOLOv11n-based detection model tailored for efficient maritime ship sensing. First, we introduce the GatedFDConvBlock, which employs gated convolutional filtering to strengthen feature extraction for small and elongated ships while suppressing background clutter, thereby reducing missed and false detections in dense scenes. Second, we improve the C2PSA module with a dynamic multi-scale attention design, TSSABlockDMS, to adaptively model cross-scale feature interactions and enhance robustness to complex maritime environments. Third, we replace the original detection head with OBBED, a parameter-sharing head that incorporates depthwise separable convolution (DSConv) and an angle prediction branch to lower model complexity while preserving high-quality localization and classification. To verify the performance of the algorithm, we were conducted on the public datasets HRSC2016, HRSC2016-MS, and ShipRSImageNet. The mAP@50 results were 95. 2%, 88. 3%, and 76. 7%, showing improvements of 3. 2%, 2. 2%, and 2. 6% compared to the original YOLOv11n.