HyperLi-Net: A hyper-light deep learning network for high-accurate and high-speed ship detection from synthetic aperture radar imagery

Abstract Ship detection from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery is attracting increasing attention due to its great value in ocean. However, existing most studies are frequently improving detection accuracy at the expense of detection speed. Thus, to solve this problem, this paper proposes HyperLi-Net for high-accurate and high-speed SAR ship detection. We propose five external modules to achieve high-accuracy, i.e., Multi-Receptive-Field Module (MRF-Module), Dilated Convolution Module (DC-Module), Channel and Spatial Attention Module (CSA-Module), Feature Fusion Module (FF-Module) and Feature Pyramid Module (FP-Module). We also adopt five internal mechanisms to achieve high-speed, i.e., Region-Free Model (RF-Model), Small Kernel (S-Kernel), Narrow Channel (N-Channel), Separable Convolution (Separa-Conv) and Batch Normalization Fusion (BN-Fusion). Experimental results on the SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD), Gaofen-SSDD and Sentinel-SSDD show that HyperLi-Net’s accuracy and speed are both superior to the other nine state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the satisfactory detection results on two Sentinel-1 SAR images can reveal HyperLi-Net’s good migration capability. HyperLi-Net is build from scratch with fewer parameters, lower computation costs and lighter model that can be efficiently trained on CPUs and is helpful for future hardware transplantation, e.g. FPGAs, DSPs, etc.