Arbitrary-oriented target detection in large scene sar images

Target detection in the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has attracted considerable attention of researchers in national defense technology worldwide, owing to its unique advantages like high resolution and large scene image acquisition capabilities of SAR. However, due to strong speckle noise and low signal-to-noise ratio, it is difficult to extract representative features of target from SAR images, which greatly inhibits the effectiveness of traditional methods. In order to address the above problems, a framework called contextual rotation region-based convolutional neural network (RCNN) with multilayer fusion is proposed in this paper. Specifically, aimed to enable RCNN to perform target detection in large scene SAR images efficiently, maximum sliding strategy is applied to crop the large scene image into a series of sub-images before RCNN. Instead of using the highest-layer output for proposal generation and target detection, fusion feature maps with high resolution and rich semantic information are constructed by multilayer fusion strategy. Then, we put forwards rotation anchors to predict the minimum circumscribed rectangle of targets to reduce redundant detection region. Furthermore, shadow areas serve as contextual features to provide extraneous information for the detector identify and locate targets accurately. Experimental results on the simulated large scene SAR image dataset show that the proposed method achieves a satisfactory performance in large scene SAR target detection.