E-FPN: Evidential Feature Pyramid Network for Ship Classification

Abstract

Ship classification, as an important problem in the field of computer vision, has been the focus of research for various algorithms over the past few decades. In particular, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become one of the most popular models for ship classification tasks, especially using deep learning methods. Currently, several classical methods have used single-scale features to tackle ship classification, without paying much attention to the impact of multiscale features. Therefore, this paper proposes a multiscale feature fusion ship classification method based on evidence theory. In this method, multiple scales of features were utilized to fuse the feature maps of three different sizes (40 × 40 × 256, 20 × 20 × 512, and 10 × 10 × 1024), which were used to perform ship classification tasks separately. Finally, the multiscales-based classification results were treated as pieces of evidence and fused at the decision level using evidence theory to obtain the final classification result. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to classical classification networks, this method can effectively improve classification accuracy.