Integrated Object Detection and Communication for Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

In this article, an integrated object detection and communication (IODC) system based on single-stage detection framework is first proposed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images in underwater environment. Specifically, the combination of the multiscale feature extraction module and semantic information enhance fusion module for SAR images in underwater environment is designed as the semantic encoder and the results prediction module with anchor-free detection method is designed as the semantic decoder. Considering the multiscale feature, the channel encoder composed by a multiscale fusion module and a redundancy module is designed, and the channel decoder is the inverse of the channel encoder. To adapt to the time-varying and complex wireless environment, an adaptive transmission (AT) mechanism based on attention mechanism and knowledge base is proposed for the IODC system. Moreover, considering the actual application requirements, a lightweight design for the IODC system with the AT mechanism is also conducted. The experiment results on the Sonar Common Target Detection dataset show that the proposed IODC system with AT mechanism can achieve nearly 91% average precision at 25 dB, which means the proposed system can achieve the effective integration of the objection detection and communication for SAR images in underwater environment. In the lightweight design, the model parameters of the proposed system can be reduced by up to 20%, with only a 2.22% sacrifice in performance.