Scattering-Point-Guided Oriented RepPoints for Ship Detection

Abstract

Ship detection finds extensive applications in fisheries management, maritime rescue, and surveillance. However, detecting nearshore targets in SAR images is challenging due to land scattering interference and non-axisymmetric ship shapes. Existing SAR ship detection models struggle to adapt to oriented ship detection in complex nearshore environments. To address this, we propose an oriented-reppoints target detection scheme guided by scattering points in SAR images. Our method deeply integrates SAR image target scattering characteristics and designs an adaptive sample selection scheme guided by target scattering points. This incorporates scattering position features into the sample quality measurement scheme, providing the network with a higher-quality set of proposed reppoints. We also introduce a novel supervised guidance paradigm that uses target scattering points to guide the initialization of reppoints, mitigating the influence of land scattering interference on the initial reppoints quality. This achieves adaptive feature learning, enhancing the quality of the initial reppoints set and the performance of object detection. Our method has been extensively tested on the SSDD and HRSID datasets, where we achieved mAP scores of 89.8% and 80.8%, respectively. These scores represent significant improvements over the baseline methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. Additionally, our method exhibits strong anti-interference capabilities in nearshore detection and has achieved state-of-the-art performance.

Keywords

• ship detection
• reppoints
• adaptive sample selection
• guided learning
• synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• scattering point