Lira-YOLO: A lightweight model for ship detection in radar images
Zhou Long, Wei Suyuan, Cui Zhongma, Fang Jiaqi, Xiaoting Yang, Wei Ding
Abstract
For the detection of marine ship objects in radar images, large-scale networks based on deep learning are difficult to be deployed on existing radar-equipped devices. This paper proposes a lightweight convolutional neural network, LiraNet, which combines the idea of dense connections, residual connections and group convolution, including stem blocks and extractor modules. The designed stem block uses a series of small convolutions to extract the input image features, and the extractor network adopts the designed two-way dense connection module, which further reduces the network operation complexity. Mounting LiraNet on the object detection framework Darknet, this paper proposes Lira-you only look once (Lira-YOLO), a lightweight model for ship detection in radar images, which can easily be deployed on the mobile devices. Lira-YOLO's prediction module uses a two-layer YOLO prediction layer and adds a residual module for better feature delivery. At the same time, in order to fully verify the performance of the model, mini-RD, a lightweight distance Doppler domain radar images dataset, is constructed. Experiments show that the network complexity of Lira-YOLO is low, being only 2.980 Bflops, and the parameter quantity is smaller, which is only 4.3 MB. The mean average precision (mAP) indicators on the mini-RD and SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) reach 83.21% and 85.46%, respectively, which is comparable to the tiny-YOLOv3. Lira-YOLO has achieved a good detection accuracy with less memory and computational cost.