Enhanced Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling Feature Fusion for Small Ship Instance Segmentation

In the maritime environment, the instance segmentation of small ships is crucial. Small ships are characterized by their limited appearance, smaller size, and ships in distant locations in marine scenes. However, existing instance segmentation algorithms do not detect and segment them, resulting in inaccurate ship segmentation. To address this, we propose a novel solution called enhanced Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) feature fusion for small ship instance segmentation. The enhanced ASPP feature fusion module focuses on small objects by refining them and fusing important features. The framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, including Mask R-CNN, Cascade Mask R-CNN, YOLACT, SOLO, and SOLOv2, in three diverse datasets, achieving an average precision (mask AP) score of 75.8% for ShipSG, 69.5% for ShipInsSeg, and 54.5% for the MariBoats datasets.