Ship detection method based on attention guidance and multi-sample decision making

Single-stage target detection methods have the characteristics of fast training speed and short detection time. However, its feature pyramid network is difficult to suppress the background and noise information of SAR ship images, and the detection head has prediction errors. To address this problem, this paper proposes a detection model based on attention guidance and multi-sample decision for synthetic aperture radar ship detection. Firstly, an attention guidance network is proposed and added to the highest level of the feature pyramid to suppress background and noise interference, thereby improving the representation ability of features. Secondly, a multi-sample decision network is proposed to participate in the prediction of target position. This network alleviates the impact of prediction errors on detection results by increasing the number of samples output in the regression branch. Finally, a novel maximum likelihood loss function is designed. This loss function constructs a maximum likelihood function using the samples output from the multi-sample decision network, which is used to standardize the training of the decision network and further improve the accuracy of target positioning. Taking the RetinaNet network model as the baseline method, compared with the baseline method and the current advanced target detection methods, this method shows the highest detection accuracy on the ship detection dataset SSDD, with AP reaching 52.8%. Compared with the baseline method, the proposed method improves the AP evaluation index 3.4% ∼ 5.7%, and the training parameter Params only increases by 2.03 M, and the frame rate FPS only decreases 0.5Iter/s.