Ship detection based on squeeze excitation skip-connection path networks for optical remote sensing images

Ship detection plays a crucial role in remote sensing image processing, which has drawn great attention in recent years. A novel neural network architecture named squeeze excitation skip-connection path networks (SESPNets) is proposed. A bottom-up path is added to feature pyramid network to improve feature extraction capability, and path-level skip-connection structure is firstly proposed to enhance information flow and reduce parameter redundancy. Also, squeeze excitation module is adopted, which can adaptively recalibrate channel-wise feature responses by adding an extra branch after each shortcut path connection block. The multi-scale fused region of interest (ROI) align is then proposed to obtain more accurate and multi-scale proposals. Finally, soft-non-maximum suppression is utilized to overcome the problem of non-maximum suppression (NMS) in ship detection. As demonstrated in the experiments, it can be seen that the SESPNets model has achieved the state-of-the-art performance, which shows the effectiveness of proposed method.