Adaptive Sample Allocation for SAR Ship Detection Based on Scale-Sensitive Wasserstein Distance

Abstract

Deep learning (DL) based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery ship detection is challenged by multiscale ships on the identical SAR image, which inevitably leads to insufficient and low-quality positive samples during training and ultimately degrades detection performance. To address this issue, we propose a Scale-Sensitive Adaptive Sample Allocation Strategy (SSA-SAS) for SAR ship detection. SSA-SAS ranks candidate boxes using a unified score that integrates a scale-sensitive Wasserstein distance (SSWD), a shape cost, and classification confidence. SSWD serves as the core regression metric, enabling adaptive tolerance to positional offsets based on object scale. Meanwhile, the shape cost introduces morphological priors to guide early-stage optimization. These components jointly enhance the quantity and quality of selected positive samples throughout training. Experimental results show that SSA-SAS improves average precision (AP) by up to 2.6% on the high-resolution SAR images dataset for ship detection and instance segmentation (HRSID) dataset and 1.4% on the SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD), while accelerating network convergence by approximately 5.0%.