Oriented Decoupling Target Detection Method for SAR Image Based on Multi-Channel Localization and Soft Thresholding

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are crucial for maritime vessel detection; however, challenges such as blurred ship edges, strong land scattering interference, and angular regression mismatches across varying target sizes hinder accurate rotational localization. In this paper, an oriented decoupling target detection method (R-MCLST) is proposed to address these issues. The method integrates three key modules: a multi-channel positioning module (MC-PM) that employs distributed average pooling and additional coordinate channels to enhance orientation awareness; a soft threshold-based multilayer perceptron (ST-MLP) that effectively mitigates background interference while robustly extracting complex features; and a Gaussian distribution-based prediction box (GD-BPB) that transforms rotated bounding box encoding into a two-dimensional Gaussian distribution using KL divergence for adaptive parameter adjustment. Experimental evaluations on the R-SSDD and MR-HRSID datasets demonstrate that R-MCLST achieves superior performance, with the R-SSDD dataset yielding AP50 of 87.48%, AP75 of 34.96%, AP of 41.15%, and AR of 46.52%, and the MR-HRSID dataset yielding AP50 of 61.59%, AP75 of 4.96%, AP of 19.13%, and AR of 22.24%. Comparative analyses confirm that the proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art networks in accurately localizing rotating targets under challenging SAR imaging conditions.