scholarly journals R-CenterNet+: Anchor-Free Detector for Ship Detection in SAR Images

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (17) ◽  
pp. 5693
Author(s):  
Yuhang Jiang ◽  
Wanwu Li ◽  
Lin Liu

In recent years, the rapid development of Deep Learning (DL) has provided a new method for ship detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. However, there are still four challenges in this task. (1) The ship targets in SAR images are very sparse. A large number of unnecessary anchor boxes may be generated on the feature map when using traditional anchor-based detection models, which could greatly increase the amount of computation and make it difficult to achieve real-time rapid detection. (2) The size of the ship targets in SAR images is relatively small. Most of the detection methods have poor performance on small ships in large scenes. (3) The terrestrial background in SAR images is very complicated. Ship targets are susceptible to interference from complex backgrounds, and there are serious false detections and missed detections. (4) The ship targets in SAR images are characterized by a large aspect ratio, arbitrary direction and dense arrangement. Traditional horizontal box detection can cause non-target areas to interfere with the extraction of ship features, and it is difficult to accurately express the length, width and axial information of ship targets. To solve these problems, we propose an effective lightweight anchor-free detector called R-Centernet+ in the paper. Its features are as follows: the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is introduced to the backbone network to improve the focusing ability on small ships; the Foreground Enhance Module (FEM) is used to introduce foreground information to reduce the interference of the complex background; the detection head that can output the ship angle map is designed to realize the rotation detection of ship targets. To verify the validity of the proposed model in this paper, experiments are performed on two public SAR image datasets, i.e., SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) and AIR-SARShip. The results show that the proposed R-Centernet+ detector can detect both inshore and offshore ships with higher accuracy than traditional models with an average precision of 95.11% on SSDD and 84.89% on AIR-SARShip, and the detection speed is quite fast with 33 frames per second.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Qiao Ke ◽  
Sun Zeng-guo ◽  
Yang Liu ◽  
Wei Wei ◽  
Marcin Woźniak ◽  
...  

A new speckle suppression algorithm is proposed for high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. It is based on the nonlocal means (NLM) filter and the modified Aubert and Aujol (AA) model. This method takes the nonlocal Dirichlet function as a linear regularization item, which constructs the weight by measuring the similarity of images. Then, a new despeckling model is introduced by combining the regularization item and the data item of the AA model, and an iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the new model. The experiments show that, compared with the AA model, the proposed model has more effective performance in suppressing speckle; namely, ENL and DCV measures are 21.75% and 4.5% higher, respectively, than for NLM. Moreover, it also has better performance in keeping the edge information.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Jimin Yu ◽  
Guangyu Zhou ◽  
Shangbo Zhou ◽  
Maowei Qin

It is very difficult to detect multi-scale synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ships, especially under complex backgrounds. Traditional constant false alarm rate methods are cumbersome in manual design and weak in migration capabilities. Based on deep learning, researchers have introduced methods that have shown good performance in order to get better detection results. However, the majority of these methods have a huge network structure and many parameters which greatly restrict the application and promotion. In this paper, a fast and lightweight detection network, namely FASC-Net, is proposed for multi-scale SAR ship detection under complex backgrounds. The proposed FASC-Net is mainly composed of ASIR-Block, Focus-Block, SPP-Block, and CAPE-Block. Specifically, without losing information, Focus-Block is placed at the forefront of FASC-Net for the first down-sampling of input SAR images at first. Then, ASIR-Block continues to down-sample the feature maps and use a small number of parameters for feature extraction. After that, the receptive field of the feature maps is increased by SPP-Block, and then CAPE-Block is used to perform feature fusion and predict targets of different scales on different feature maps. Based on this, a novel loss function is designed in the present paper in order to train the FASC-Net. The detection performance and generalization ability of FASC-Net have been demonstrated by a series of comparative experiments on the SSDD dataset, SAR-Ship-Dataset, and HRSID dataset, from which it is obvious that FASC-Net has outstanding detection performance on the three datasets and is superior to the existing excellent ship detection methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Zengguo Sun ◽  
Mingmin Zhao ◽  
Bai Jia

We constructed a GF-3 SAR image dataset based on road segmentation to boost the development of GF-3 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image road segmentation technology and make GF-3 SAR images be applied to practice better. We selected 23 scenes of GF-3 SAR images in Shaanxi, China, cut them into road chips with 512 × 512 pixels, and then labeled the dataset using LabelMe labeling tool. The dataset consists of 10026 road chips, and these road images are from different GF-3 imaging modes, so there is diversity in resolution and polarization. Three segmentation algorithms such as Multi-task Network Cascades (MNC), Fully Convolutional Instance-aware Semantic Segmentation (FCIS), and Mask Region Convolutional Neural Networks (Mask R-CNN) are trained by using the dataset. The experimental result measures including Average Precision (AP) and Intersection over Union (IoU) show that segmentation algorithms work well with this dataset, and the segmentation accuracy of Mask R-CNN is the best, which demonstrates the validity of the dataset we constructed.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1643
Author(s):  
Ming Liu ◽  
Shichao Chen ◽  
Fugang Lu ◽  
Mengdao Xing ◽  
Jingbiao Wei

For target detection in complex scenes of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, the false alarms in the land areas are hard to eliminate, especially for the ones near the coastline. Focusing on the problem, an algorithm based on the fusion of multiscale superpixel segmentations is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the SAR images are partitioned by using different scales of superpixel segmentation. For the superpixels in each scale, the land-sea segmentation is achieved by judging their statistical properties. Then, the land-sea segmentation results obtained in each scale are combined with the result of the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector to eliminate the false alarms located on the land areas of the SAR image. In the end, to enhance the robustness of the proposed algorithm, the detection results obtained in different scales are fused together to realize the final target detection. Experimental results on real SAR images have verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 1909
Author(s):  
Jiahuan Jiang ◽  
Xiongjun Fu ◽  
Rui Qin ◽  
Xiaoyan Wang ◽  
Zhifeng Ma

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has become one of the important technical means of marine monitoring in the field of remote sensing due to its all-day, all-weather advantage. National territorial waters to achieve ship monitoring is conducive to national maritime law enforcement, implementation of maritime traffic control, and maintenance of national maritime security, so ship detection has been a hot spot and focus of research. After the development from traditional detection methods to deep learning combined methods, most of the research always based on the evolving Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computing power to propose more complex and computationally intensive strategies, while in the process of transplanting optical image detection ignored the low signal-to-noise ratio, low resolution, single-channel and other characteristics brought by the SAR image imaging principle. Constantly pursuing detection accuracy while ignoring the detection speed and the ultimate application of the algorithm, almost all algorithms rely on powerful clustered desktop GPUs, which cannot be implemented on the frontline of marine monitoring to cope with the changing realities. To address these issues, this paper proposes a multi-channel fusion SAR image processing method that makes full use of image information and the network’s ability to extract features; it is also based on the latest You Only Look Once version 4 (YOLO-V4) deep learning framework for modeling architecture and training models. The YOLO-V4-light network was tailored for real-time and implementation, significantly reducing the model size, detection time, number of computational parameters, and memory consumption, and refining the network for three-channel images to compensate for the loss of accuracy due to light-weighting. The test experiments were completed entirely on a portable computer and achieved an Average Precision (AP) of 90.37% on the SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD), simplifying the model while ensuring a lead over most existing methods. The YOLO-V4-lightship detection algorithm proposed in this paper has great practical application in maritime safety monitoring and emergency rescue.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 2558
Author(s):  
Lei Yu ◽  
Haoyu Wu ◽  
Zhi Zhong ◽  
Liying Zheng ◽  
Qiuyue Deng ◽  
...  

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an active earth observation system with a certain surface penetration capability and can be employed to observations all-day and all-weather. Ship detection using SAR is of great significance to maritime safety and port management. With the wide application of in-depth learning in ordinary images and good results, an increasing number of detection algorithms began entering the field of remote sensing images. SAR image has the characteristics of small targets, high noise, and sparse targets. Two-stage detection methods, such as faster regions with convolution neural network (Faster RCNN), have good results when applied to ship target detection based on the SAR graph, but their efficiency is low and their structure requires many computing resources, so they are not suitable for real-time detection. One-stage target detection methods, such as single shot multibox detector (SSD), make up for the shortage of the two-stage algorithm in speed but lack effective use of information from different layers, so it is not as good as the two-stage algorithm in small target detection. We propose the two-way convolution network (TWC-Net) based on a two-way convolution structure and use multiscale feature mapping to process SAR images. The two-way convolution module can effectively extract the feature from SAR images, and the multiscale mapping module can effectively process shallow and deep feature information. TWC-Net can avoid the loss of small target information during the feature extraction, while guaranteeing good perception of a large target by the deep feature map. We tested the performance of our proposed method using a common SAR ship dataset SSDD. The experimental results show that our proposed method has a higher recall rate and precision, and the F-Measure is 93.32%. It has smaller parameters and memory consumption than other methods and is superior to other methods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-307
Author(s):  
Zengguo Sun ◽  
Rui Shi ◽  
Wei Wei

When Synthetic-Aperture (SAR) image is transformed into wavelet domain and other transform domains, most of the coefficients of the image are small or zero. This shows that SAR image is sparse. However, speckle can be seen in SAR images. The non-local means is a despeckling algorithm, but it cannot overcome the speckle in homogeneous regions and it blurs edge details of the image. In order to solve these problems, an improved non-local means is suggested. At the same time, in order to better suppress the speckle effectively in edge regions, the non-subsampled Shearlet transform (NSST) is applied. By combining NSST with the improved non-local means, a new type of despeckling algorithm is proposed. Results show that the proposed algorithm leads to a satisfying performance for SAR images.


Author(s):  
Khwairakpam Amitab ◽  
Debdatta Kandar ◽  
Arnab K. Maji

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) are imaging Radar, it uses electromagnetic radiation to illuminate the scanned surface and produce high resolution images in all-weather condition, day and night. Interference of signals causes noise and degrades the quality of the image, it causes serious difficulty in analyzing the images. Speckle is multiplicative noise that inherently exist in SAR images. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) have the capability of learning and is gaining popularity in SAR image processing. Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) is a feed forward artificial neural network model that consists of an input layer, several hidden layers, and an output layer. We have simulated MLP with two hidden layer in Matlab. Speckle noises were added to the target SAR image and applied MLP for speckle noise reduction. It is found that speckle noise in SAR images can be reduced by using MLP. We have considered Log-sigmoid, Tan-Sigmoid and Linear Transfer Function for the hidden layers. The MLP network are trained using Gradient descent with momentum back propagation, Resilient back propagation and Levenberg-Marquardt back propagation and comparatively evaluated the performance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Ming Liu ◽  
Shichao Chen ◽  
Fugang Lu ◽  
Junsheng Liu

Dictionary construction is a key factor for the sparse representation- (SR-) based algorithms. It has been verified that the learned dictionaries are more effective than the predefined ones. In this paper, we propose a product dictionary learning (PDL) algorithm to achieve synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target configuration recognition. The proposed algorithm obtains the dictionaries from a statistical standpoint to enhance the robustness of the proposed algorithm to noise. And, taking the inevitable multiplicative speckle in SAR images into account, the proposed algorithm employs the product model to describe SAR images. A more accurate description of the SAR image results in higher recognition rates. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm are validated by the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) database.


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