SAR-DRBNet: Adaptive Feature Weaving and Algebraically Equivalent Aggregation for High-Precision Rotated SAR Detection
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is widely used for target detection in complex backgrounds and adverse weather conditions. However, high-precision detection of rotated small targets remains challenging due to severe speckle noise, significant scale variations, and the need for robust rotation-aware representations. To address these issues, we propose SAR-DRBNet, a high-precision rotated small-target detection framework built upon YOLOv13. First, we introduce a Detail-Enhanced Oriented Bounding Box detection head (DEOBB), which leverages multi-branch enhanced convolutions to strengthen fine-grained feature extraction and improve oriented bounding box regression, thereby enhancing rotation sensitivity and localization accuracy for small targets. Second, we design a Ck-MultiDilated Reparameterization Block (CkDRB) that captures multi-scale contextual cues and suppresses speckle interference via multi-branch dilated convolutions and an efficient reparameterization strategy. Third, we propose a Dynamic Feature Weaving module (DynWeave) that integrates global–local dual attention with dynamic large-kernel convolutions to adaptively fuse features across scales and orientations, improving robustness in cluttered SAR scenes. Extensive experiments on three widely used SAR rotated object detection benchmarks (HRSID, RSDD-SAR, and DSSDD) demonstrate that SAR-DRBNet achieves a strong balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency compared with state-of-the-art oriented bounding box detectors, while exhibiting superior cross-dataset generalization. These results indicate that SAR-DRBNet provides an effective and reliable solution for rotated small-target detection in SAR imagery.
Authors
- Zhongzhen Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6400-1481)
- Xinli Zheng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5047-7319)
- S. K. Chang
- Lanfang Lei
- Ping Zhong
- Changyu Liao
- Long Ma
- Wenjun Wei
Institutions
- National University of Defense Technology (CN)
- Donghua University (CN)
- Aerospace Information Research Institute (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Remote Sensing
- Published
- 2026-02-16
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18040619
- Primary Topic
- Advanced SAR Imaging Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00