Pulse Compression Radar Ship Detection Method Based on Improved SSD

Radar ship target detection plays an important role in ship navigation and collision avoidance. The ship target detection for synthetic aperture radar has been relatively mature, while pulse compression radar has relatively poor imaging effect and more noise interference, so there are few related studies. Aiming at the problem of poor detection of small target ships in pulse compression radar images, an improved SSD-based radar ship target detection method is proposed in this paper. Based on the Single Shot MultiBox Detector, we improved the network model. Resnet50 is used to replace the backbone network to effectively extract the feature information of small targets. Feature fusion module which contains deconvolution and group convolution is added to combine low-level features and deep features. Spatial attention module is used to suppress background and increase detection accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than the benchmark model.