LSDA-YOLO: Enhanced SAR Target Detection with Large Kernel and SimAM Dual Attention

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target detection faces significant challenges including speckle noise interference, weak small object features, and multi-category imbalance. To address these issues, this paper proposes LSDA-YOLO, an enhanced SAR target detection framework built upon the YOLO architecture that integrates Large Kernel Attention and SimAM dual attention mechanisms. Our method effectively overcomes these challenges by synergistically combining global context modeling and local detail enhancement to improve robustness and accuracy. Notably, this framework leverages the inherent symmetry properties of typical SAR targets (e.g., geometric symmetry of ships and bridges) to strengthen feature consistency, thereby reducing interference from asymmetric background clutter. By replacing the baseline C2PSA module with Deformable Large Kernel Attention and incorporating parameter-free SimAM attention throughout the detection network, our approach achieves improved detection accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. The deformable large kernel attention module expands the receptive field through synergistic integration of deformable and dilated convolutions, enhancing geometric modeling for complex-shaped targets. Simultaneously, the SimAM attention mechanism enables adaptive feature enhancement across channel and spatial dimensions based on visual neuroscience principles, effectively improving discriminability for small targets in noisy SAR environments. Experimental results on the RSAR dataset demonstrate that LSDA-YOLO achieves 80.8% mAP50, 53.2% mAP50-95, and 77.6% F1 score, with computational complexity of 7.3 GFLOPS, showing significant improvement over baseline models and other attention variants while maintaining lightweight characteristics suitable for real-time applications.