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.

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Publication Details

Journal
Remote Sensing
Published
2026-02-16
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18040619
Primary Topic
Advanced SAR Imaging Techniques
Type
article
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article

SAR-DRBNet: Adaptive Feature Weaving and Algebraically Equivalent Aggregation for High-Precision Rotated SAR Detection

Zhongzhen Sun, Xinli Zheng, S. K. Chang, Lanfang Lei et al.
Remote Sensing
Advanced SAR Imaging Techniques
article

SAR-DRBNet: Adaptive Feature Weaving and Algebraically Equivalent Aggregation for High-Precision Rotated SAR Detection

Zhongzhen Sun, Xinli Zheng, S. K. Chang, Lanfang Lei, Ping Zhong, Changyu Liao, Long Ma, Wenjun Wei
article en

Abstract

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.

Remote SensingVol. 18(4)
National University of Defense Technology (CN), Donghua University (CN), Aerospace Information Research Institute (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 55%
Advanced SAR Imaging Techniques
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