R-SABMNet: A YOLOv8-Based Model for Oriented SAR Ship Detection with Spatial Adaptive Aggregation

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is extensively utilized in ship detection due to its robust performance under various weather conditions and its capability to operate effectively both during the day and at night. However, ships in SAR images exhibit various characteristics including complex land scattering interference, variable scales, and dense spatial arrangements. Existing algorithms are insufficient in effectively addressing these challenges. To enhance detection accuracy, this paper proposes the Rotated model with Spatial Aggregation and a Balanced-Shifted Mechanism (R-SABMNet) built upon YOLOv8. First, we introduce the Spatial-Guided Adaptive Feature Aggregation (SG-AFA) module, which enhances sensitivity to ship features while suppressing land scattering interference. Subsequently, we propose the Balanced Shifted Multi-Scale Fusion (BSMF) module, which effectively enhances local detail information and improves adaptability to multi-scale targets. Finally, we introduce the Gaussian Wasserstein Distance Loss (GWD), which effectively addresses localization errors arising from angle and scale inconsistencies in dense scenes. Our R-SABMNet outperforms other deep learning-based methods on the SSDD+ and HRSID datasets. Specifically, our method achieves a detection accuracy of 96.32%, a recall of 93.13%, and an average level of accuracy of 95.28% on the SSDD+ dataset.