ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.

Sec. Ocean Observation

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1574991

This article is part of the Research TopicRemote Sensing Applications in Oceanography with Deep LearningView all 16 articles

A Marine Ship Detection Method for Super-Resolution SAR Images Based on Hierarchical Multi-Scale Mask R-CNN

Provisionally accepted
Jiancong  FanJiancong FanMiaoxin  GuoMiaoxin GuoLei  ZhangLei ZhangJianjun  LiuJianjun LiuYang  LiYang Li*
  • Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images have all-weather observation capabilities and are crucial in ocean surveillance and maritime ship detection. However, their inherent low resolution, scattered noise, and complex background interference severely limit the accuracy of target detection. This paper proposes an innovative framework that integrates super-resolution reconstruction and multiscale maritime ship detection to improve the accuracy of marine ship detection. Firstly, a TaylorGAN super-resolution network is designed, and the TaylorShift attention mechanism is introduced to enhance the generator's ability to restore the edge and texture details of the ship. The Taylor series approximation is combined to optimize the attention calculation, and a multi-scale discriminator module is designed to improve global consistency. Secondly, a hierarchical multi-scale Mask R-CNN (HMS-MRCNN) detection method is proposed, which significantly improves the multi-scale maritime ship detection problem through the cross-layer fusion of shallow features (small targets) and deep features (large targets). Experiments on SAR datasets show that TaylorGAN has achieved significant improvements in both peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity indicators, outperforming the baseline model. After adding super-resolution reconstruction, the average precision and recall of HMS-MRCNN are also greatly improved.

Keywords: Synthetic aperture radar (SAR), Super-resolution reconstruction, marine ship detection, Multiscale feature fusion, Mask R-CNN, Taylorshift Attention Mechanism

Received: 11 Feb 2025; Accepted: 27 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Fan, Guo, Zhang, Liu and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Yang Li, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China

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