Lightweight Ship Detection Network for SAR Range-Compressed Domain

The utilization of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for real-time ship detection proves highly advantageous in the supervision and monitoring of maritime activities. Ship detection in the range-compressed domain of SAR rather than in fully focused SAR imagery can significantly reduce the time and computational resources required for complete SAR imaging, enabling lightweight real-time ship detection methods to be implemented on an airborne or spaceborne SAR platform. However, there is a lack of lightweight ship detection methods specifically designed for the SAR range-compressed domain. In this paper, we propose Fast Range-Compressed Detection (FastRCDet), a novel lightweight network for ship detection in the SAR range-compressed domain. Firstly, to address the distinctive geometric characteristics of the SAR range-compressed domain, we propose a Lightweight Adaptive Network (LANet) as the backbone of the network. We introduce Arbitrary Kernel Convolution (AKConv) as a fundamental component, which enables the flexible adjustment of the receptive field shape and better adaptation to the large scale and aspect ratio characteristics of ships in the range-compressed domain. Secondly, to enhance the efficiency and simplicity of the network model further, we propose an innovative Multi-Scale Fusion Head (MSFH) module directly integrated after the backbone, eliminating the need for a neck module. This module effectively integrates features at various scales to more accurately capture detailed information about the target. Thirdly, to further enhance the network’s adaptability to ships in the range-compressed domain, we propose a novel Direction IoU (DIoU) loss function that leverages angle cost to control the convergence direction of predicted bounding boxes, thereby improving detection accuracy. Experimental results on a publicly available dataset demonstrate that FastRCDet achieves significant reductions in parameters and computational complexity compared to mainstream networks without compromising detection performance in SAR range-compressed images. FastRCDet achieves a low parameter of 2.49 M and a high detection speed of 38.02 frames per second (FPS), surpassing existing lightweight detection methods in terms of both model size and processing rate. Simultaneously, it attains an average accuracy (AP) of 77.12% in terms of its detection performance. This method provides a baseline in lightweight network design for SAR ship detection in the range-compressed domain and offers practical implications for resource-constrained embedded platforms.