Ship Segmentation via Combined Attention Mechanism and Efficient Channel Attention High-Resolution Representation Network

Ship segmentation with small imaging size, which challenges ship detection and visual navigation model performance due to imaging noise interference, has attracted significant attention in the field. To address the issues, this study proposed a novel combined attention mechanism and efficient channel attention high-resolution representation network (CA2HRNET). More specially, the proposed model fulfills accurate ship segmentation by introducing a channel attention mechanism, a multi-scale spatial attention mechanism, and a weight self-adjusted attention mechanism. Overall, the proposed CA2HRNET model enhances attention mechanism performance by focusing on the trivial yet important features and pixels of a ship against background-interference pixels. The proposed ship segmentation model can accurately focus on ship features by implementing both channel and spatial fusion attention mechanisms at each scale feature layer. Moreover, the channel attention mechanism helps the proposed framework allocate higher weights to ship-feature-related pixels. The experimental results show that the proposed CA2HRNET model outperforms its counterparts in terms of accuracy (Accs), precision (Pc), F1-score (F1s), intersection over union (IoU), and frequency-weighted IoU (FIoU). The average Accs, Pc, F1s, IoU, and FIoU for the proposed CA2HRNET model were 99.77%, 97.55%, 97%, 96.97%, and 99.55%, respectively. The research findings can promote intelligent ship visual navigation and maritime traffic management in the smart shipping era.