LHSDNet: A Lightweight and High-Accuracy SAR Ship Object Detection Algorithm

At present, the majority of deep learning-based ship object detection algorithms concentrate predominantly on enhancing recognition accuracy, often overlooking the complexity of the algorithm. These complex algorithms demand significant computational resources, making them unsuitable for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, such as airborne and spaceborne platforms, thereby limiting their practicality. With the purpose of alleviating this problem, a lightweight and high-accuracy synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship image detection network (LHSDNet) is proposed. Initially, GhostHGNetV2 was utilized as the feature extraction network, and the calculation amount of the network was reduced by GhostConv. Next, a lightweight feature fusion network was designed to combine shallow and deep features through lightweight convolutions, effectively preserving more information while minimizing computational requirements. Lastly, the feature extraction module was integrated through parameter sharing, and the detection head was lightweight to save computing resources further. The results from our experiments demonstrate that the proposed LHSDNet model increases mAP50 by 0.7% in comparison to the baseline model. Additionally, it illustrates a pronounced decrease in parameter count, computational demand, and model file size by 48.33%, 51.85%, and 41.26%, respectively, when contrasted with the baseline model. LHSDNet achieves a balance between precision and computing resources, rendering it more appropriate for edge device implementation.