Swin-PAFF: A SAR Ship Detection Network with Contextual Cross-Information Fusion

Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR)image target detection has widespread applications in both military and civil domains.However,SAR images pose challenges due to strong scattering,indistinct edge contours,multi-scale representation,sparsity,and severe background interference,which make the existing target detection methods in low accuracy.To address this issue,this paper proposes a multi-scale fusion framework(Swin-PAFF)for SAR target detection that utilizes the global context perception capability of the Transformer and the multi-layer feature fusion learning ability of the feature pyramid structure(FPN).Firstly,to tackle the issue of inadequate perceptual image context information in SAR target detection,we propose an end-to-end SAR target detection network with the Transformer structure as the backbone.Furthermore,we enhance the ability of the Swin Transformer to acquire contextual features and cross-information by incorporating a Swin-CC backbone network model that combines the Spatial Depthwise Pooling(SDP)module and the self-attentive mechanism.Finally,we design a cross-layer fusion neck module(PAFF)that better handles multi-scale variations and complex situations(such as sparsity,background interference,etc.).Our devised approach yields a noteworthy AP@0.5:0.95 performance of 91.3%when assessed on the HRSID dataset.The application of our proposed technique has resulted in a noteworthy advancement of 8%in the AP@0.5:0.95 scores on the HRSID dataset.