Title
BiFA-YOLO: A Novel YOLO-Based Method for Arbitrary-Oriented Ship Detection in High-Resolution SAR Images
Abstract
Due to its great application value in the military and civilian fields, ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has always attracted much attention. However, ship targets in High-Resolution (HR) SAR images show the significant characteristics of multi-scale, arbitrary directions and dense arrangement, posing enormous challenges to detect ships quickly and accurately. To address these issues above, a novel YOLO-based arbitrary-oriented SAR ship detector using bi-directional feature fusion and angular classification (BiFA-YOLO) is proposed in this article. First of all, a novel bi-directional feature fusion module (Bi-DFFM) tailored to SAR ship detection is applied to the YOLO framework. This module can efficiently aggregate multi-scale features through bi-directional (top-down and bottom-up) information interaction, which is helpful for detecting multi-scale ships. Secondly, to effectively detect arbitrary-oriented and densely arranged ships in HR SAR images, we add an angular classification structure to the head network. This structure is conducive to accurately obtaining ships' angle information without the problem of boundary discontinuity and complicated parameter regression. Meanwhile, in BiFA-YOLO, a random rotation mosaic data augmentation method is employed to suppress the impact of angle imbalance. Compared with other conventional data augmentation methods, the proposed method can better improve detection performance of arbitrary-oriented ships. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on the SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) and large-scene HR SAR images from GF-3 satellite to verify our method. The proposed method can reach the detection performance with precision = 94.85%, recall = 93.97%, average precision = 93.90%, and F1-score = 0.9441 on SSDD. The detection speed of our method is approximately 13.3 ms per 512 x 512 image. In addition, comparison experiments with other deep learning-based methods and verification experiments on large-scene HR SAR images demonstrate that our method shows strong robustness and adaptability.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.3390/rs13214209
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
bi-directional feature fusion, angular classification, arbitrary-oriented ship detection, high-resolution (HR), synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
Journal
13
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
21
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhongzhen Sun100.34
Xiangguang Leng200.34
Yu Lei300.34
Boli Xiong400.34
Kefeng Ji500.34
Gangyao Kuang602.37