A Novel Ship Detector based on Attention Mechanism and Upsampling Operator

As one of the most important means for earth observation, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection has been playing an increasingly important role recently. However, the accuracy of one-stage detectors is relatively low when ships are densely arranged in SAR images. It means that current detectors are insufficient to meet the application requirements. In this paper, an improved YOLOv5 detector, which is based on the attention mechanism and upsampling operator, is proposed. We adopt the ECA attention mechanism to solve the issue of insufficient feature extraction capability for ship targets. Besides, we propose the CARAFE upsampling operator to enhance the proportion of ship detail information in reconstructed feature maps. Experiments on the SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) demonstrate that the detection P, R, and mAP metrics have improved by 4.1%, 4.8%, and 2% compared with the original YOLOv5 algorithm.