FAWT-Net: Attention-Matrix Despeckling and Haar Wavelet Reconstruction for Small-Scale SAR Ship Detection

Aiming at the challenges faced by the detection of small-scale ship targets in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, this paper proposes a novel deep learning network named FAWT-Net based on attention-matrix despeckling and Haar wavelet reconstruction. This network collaboratively optimizes the detection performance through three core modules. First, during the feature transfer stage from backbone to the neck, a filtering module based on attention matrix is designed, which can suppress the speckle noise. Then, during feature upsampling stage, a wavelet transform feature upsampling method for reconstructing image details is designed to enhance the distinguishability of target boundaries and textures. At the same time, the network also combines sub-image feature stitching downsampling to avoid losing key details in small targets, and adopts a scale-sensitive detection head. By adaptively adjusting the shape constraints of prediction boxes, it effectively solves the regression deviation problem of ship targets with inconsistent aspect ratios. Verified by experiments on SSDD and LS-SSDD, the proposed method improves AP50 by 1.3% and APS by 0.8% on the SSDD. Meanwhile, it is verified that the proposed method has higher precision and recall rates on the LS-SSDD, and the recall rate has been increased by 2.2%.