FINet: A Feature Interaction Network for SAR Ship Object-Level and Pixel-Level Detection

Deep learning-based detection methods have achieved great success in ship target detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. However, due to the interference of imaging mechanism, speckle noise, and sea and land clutter, ship detection in SAR images still suffers from difficult interpretation. It is found that most ship detection algorithms focus on object-level detection while ignoring pixel-level information. In order to further improve the recognition effectiveness and positioning accuracy of ships in SAR images, we present a novel ship detection method based on a feature interaction network (FINet) in SAR images from the perspective of object-level and pixel-level. FINet consists of an object-level detection network and a pixel-level detection network. The information of the two branches is fused through the feature interaction module (FIM), and then, the object-level information and pixel-level information are enhanced by the feature guidance module (FGM). Finally, FINet utilizes object-level and pixel-level detection heads for prediction and regression to obtain object-level classification accuracy, positioning bounding box coordinates, and pixel-level binary classification results. The experimental results demonstrate that the classification effectiveness and localization accuracy of FINet are better than those of the comparison algorithms, and FINet achieves the best performance.