A Lightweight Attention-Guided and Geometry-Aware Framework for Robust Maritime Ship Detection in Complex Electro-Optical Environments

Reliable ship detection in complex maritime optical imagery is a fundamental requirement for intelligent maritime monitoring and maritime automation systems. However, severe image degradation, large-scale variations, and background clutter often lead to feature ambiguity and unstable detection performance in real-world maritime environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a lightweight one-stage ship detection framework designed for robust real-time perception under degraded maritime sensing conditions. The proposed method incorporates an Adaptive Expert Selection Attention (AESA) mechanism to perform adaptive feature selection and background suppression under visually degraded conditions, together with a Geometry-Aware MultiScale Fusion (GAMF) module that enables orientation-aware aggregation of contextual information for elongated ship targets near complex sea–sky boundaries. In addition, a geometry-aware bounding box regression refinement is introduced to improve localization consistency in image space. Extensive experiments conducted on a unified real-world maritime benchmark demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms the baseline YOLO11n model by approximately 2–5 percentage points in terms of [email protected] and [email protected]:0.95, while maintaining moderate computational complexity and real-time inference capability. These results indicate that the proposed method provides a practical and deployment-oriented perception solution for maritime automation applications, including onboard electro-optical sensing and coastal surveillance.