Fused Adaptive Receptive Field Mechanism and Dynamic Multiscale Dilated Convolution for Side-Scan Sonar Image Segmentation

Side-scan sonar (SSS) is a vital sensor for marine survey, which is widely used in military and civilian fields. The accurate segmentation of SSS images is critical in sonar image intelligent interpretation. Existing SSS image segmentation methods have several limitations, such as insufficient feature extraction, relatively worse segmentation results for tiny target categories, and serious interference by seabed reverberation noise and bright shadow region. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture SSS image segmentation method based on convolution neural network (CNN). First, we extract the multi-scale feature information contained in target region using the dynamic multi-scale dilated convolution (DMDC_Conv). Second, to further obtain the global and detail feature information, we construct the adaptive receptive field mechanism block (ARFM_Block). Third, we design a feature fusion attention mechanism block (FFAM_Block) to fuse high-level and low-level feature information with different scales and suppress background information interference. Final, we construct a tree structure optimization module (TSOM) to solve the problem of pixel misclassification and obtain refine SSS image segmentation results. Extensive experiments are carried out on the constructed real scene SSS image dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 93.24% and 90.82% of MPA and MIoU, respectively, which outperforms other state-of-the-art methods and has a substantial advantage in inference speed and calculation parameters.