A Morphology-Guided Decoupled Framework for Oriented SAR Ship Detection
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摘要: 合成孔径雷达(SAR)以其全天时、全天候的观测能力,在遥感检测中得到了广泛应用。然而,受限于标注精度,目前主流的 SAR 目标检测方法多依赖水平框标注,难以实现精确的目标角度和尺度估计。同时,尽管弱监督学习在光学图像中的角度预测取得了进展,但其忽视了 SAR 特有的成像几何,难以有效泛化。为解决上述挑战,该文提出了一种融合 SAR 成像机理的有向舰船检测新框架,核心思想在于将检测任务解耦为定位与方向估计两个独立的子模块。其中,定位模块可以直接利用任意现有的、在水平框标注上训练的检测器;而方向估计模块则在一个专门构建的形态学合成二值数据集上进行全监督训练。该框架的优势在于无需修改原有检测器结构和重新训练的前提下,即插即用地赋予模型高精度的有向框预测能力。实验验证了所提方法在多个数据集上相较于现有仅依赖水平框监督的方法表现出更优的性能,部分场景中甚至超越全监督方法,体现出强大的有效性与工程应用价值Abstract:
Objective Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an indispensable tool in remote sensing, yet the effective detection of ships in SAR imagery remains a significant challenge. Mainstream deep learning methods typically rely on Horizontal Bounding Boxes (HBBs) annotations, which are insufficient for estimating the precise orientation and scale of ships. While Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBBs) provide this data, obtaining accurate OBBs annotations for SAR is prohibitively expensive and often unreliable due to SAR-specific phenomena like speckle noise and geometric distortions. Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) presents a promising alternative, but existing techniques developed for optical images do not generalize well to the SAR domain. This study departs from the traditional WSOD paradigm to propose a novel, simulation-driven decoupled framework. The objective is to enable existing HBB detectors to predict precise OBBs without structural modification by training a specialized orientation module on a fully-supervised synthetic dataset that mimics core SAR target morphology. Methods The proposed method decouples the complex task of oriented object detection into two sequential sub-problems: coarse localization and fine-grained orientation estimation ( Fig 1 ). First, an Axis-aligned Localization Module, consisting of a standard HBBs detection network (e.g., YOLOX), is trained on available HBB labels to identify candidate regions of interest. This stage leverages the high performance of existing detectors to achieve high-recall, coarse localization, outputting a set of image patches containing potential ship targets. Second, to learn orientation without OBBs labels, a large-scale Morphological Simulation Dataset of binary images is constructed. This synthetic dataset forms the core of the method. The process begins with generating simple binary rectangles with randomized aspect ratios and known ground-truth orientations. To simulate the appearance of binarized SAR ship targets, a series of morphological modulations are applied, including edge and regional erosion and dilation to create boundary ambiguity, and the addition of structured “strong scattering cross noise” to mimic SAR artifacts. This yields a large training set of binary images with precise orientation labels. Third, an Orientation Estimation Module, using a lightweight ResNet-18 network, is trained exclusively on this synthetic dataset. It learns to predict an object’s orientation and refine its aspect ratio based purely on shape and contour. During inference, candidate patches from the localization module are binarized and fed into this orientation module. The final Oriented Bounding Box is then generated by fusing the spatial coordinates from the initial HBBs with the predicted angle and refined dimensions.Results and Discussions The efficacy of the proposed method is extensively evaluated on two public SAR ship detection benchmarks: HRSID and SSDD. The model is trained using only HBBs annotations, while its performance is evaluated against ground-truth OBBs using the standard Average Precision (AP50) and Recall (R) metrics. The method demonstrates superior performance compared to existing weakly supervised techniques and is competitive with fully supervised ones ( Table 1 andTable 2 ). On the challenging HRSID dataset, the proposed method achieves an AP50 of 84.3% and a recall of 91.9%. This result not only surpasses other weakly supervised methods like H2Rbox-v2 (56.2% AP50) and the method from Yue et al. (81.5% AP50), but also exceeds the performance of several fully supervised algorithms, including R-RetinaNet (72.7% AP50) and S2ANet (80.8% AP50). A similar performance advantage is observed on the SSDD dataset, where the method attains an AP50 of 89.4%, representing a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art weakly supervised result of 87.3%. Visual inspection of the detection results confirms these quantitative findings (Fig 1 ). The proposed method exhibits a markedly lower rate of missed detections, particularly for small and densely clustered ships, when compared to other weakly supervised approaches. This enhanced robustness is attributed to the high-recall nature of the first-stage localization network combined with the accurate orientation cues learned from the morphological dataset. To address key methodological questions, new experiments were conducted. First, the domain gap between the synthetic and real data was analyzed. A UMAP visualization of the network's high-dimensional features (Fig. 5 ) shows a high degree of overlap and a similar manifold structure between the two domains, confirming their morphological similarity. Second, a crucial ablation study on the morphological components (Fig 4 ) demonstrated that each simulation element progressively contributes to the final performance, justifying the high-fidelity simulation process.Conclusions This paper presents a novel and effective morphology-guided, decoupled framework for oriented ship detection in SAR images. By decoupling localization and orientation, the framework enables standard HBB detectors to perform high-precision oriented detection without retraining. The central innovation is the fully-supervised morphological simulation dataset, which allows a dedicated module to learn robust orientation features from structural contours, bypassing the challenges of real SAR data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this approach significantly outperforms existing HBB-supervised methods and is competitive with fully supervised ones. The method's plug-and-play nature highlights its practical value. -
表 1 本文方法与典型检测方法在SSDD数据集上的性能比较
表 2 本文方法与典型检测方法在HRSID数据集上的性能比较
表 3 不同轴对齐检测器对最终精度的影响
数据集 轴对齐检测器 HBBs AP50 OBBs AP50 HBBs R OBBs R SSDD FCOS[22] 81.9 78.1 91.2 88.8 CenterNet[23] 90.2 88.5 96.7 94.7 Faster-RCNN[3] 90.0 88.1 93.0 90.1 YOLOX[4] 90.3 89.4 99.1 95.6 HRSID FOCS[22] 78.4 71.2 87.6 80.3 CenterNet[23] 86.6 77.5 92.3 85.1 Faster-RCNN[3] 79.7 70.3 83.5 78.7 YOLOX[4] 89.0 84.3 96.1 90.8 -
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