LSR-Det: A Lightweight Detector for Ship Detection in SAR Images Based on Oriented Bounding Box

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have significantly advanced in recent years in detecting arbitrary-oriented ships in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. However, challenges remain with multi-scale target detection and deployment on satellite-based platforms due to the extensive model parameters and high computational complexity. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight method for arbitrary-oriented ship detection in SAR images, named LSR-Det. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight backbone network based on contour guidance, which reduces the number of parameters while maintaining excellent feature extraction capability. Additionally, a lightweight adaptive feature pyramid network is designed to enhance the fusion capability of the ship features across different layers with a low computational cost by incorporating adaptive ship feature fusion modules between the feature layers. To efficiently utilize the fused features, a lightweight rotating detection head is designed, incorporating the idea of sharing the convolutional parameters, thereby improving the network’s ability to detect multi-scale ship targets. The experiments conducted on the SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) and the rotating ship detection dataset (RSDD-SAR) demonstrate that LSR-Det achieves an average precision (AP50) of 98.5% and 97.2% with 3.21 G floating point operations (FLOPs) and 0.98 M parameters, respectively, outperforming the current popular SAR arbitrary-direction ship target detection methods.