A Deep Learning-Based SAR Ship Detection
Chushi Yu Yoan Shin*
School of Electronic Engineering
Soongsil University
Seoul 06978, Korea
Email: csyu@soongsil.ac.kr
Abstract—In recent years, with the in-depth development of
remote sensing technology, ship detection based on remote
2023 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Information and Communication (ICAIIC) | 978-1-6654-5645-6/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICAIIC57133.2023.10067131
sensing images has become an important task for coastal
countries. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is one of the most
important active imaging sensors in remote sensing since it is not
affected by the clouds, day and night. However, ship targets in
SAR images have problems such as unclear contour information,
complex background, and strong scattering. Ship detection
algorithms based on the convolutional neural networks achieved
good results, albeit with many missed and false detections. You
only look once (YOLO) is a single-stage target detection
algorithm, which has the characteristics of fast speed and high
accuracy. In this paper, a YOLOv7-based ship scheme for SAR
images is proposed. Numerical experiments on the high-
resolution SAR images dataset (HRSID) and SAR ship detection
dataset (SSDD) prove the effectiveness of the method, showing
that the method can increase the speed without reducing the
detection accuracy and recall. In addition, the experimental
results also demonstrate the robustness of the model and the
ability to detect ship targets in complex marine environment.
Keywords—Synthetic aperture radar, remote sensing, ship
detection, deep learning, YOLOv7
I. INTRODUCTION
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a microwave imaging
sensor that can actively detect in all-day and all-weather
conditions. It has good applicability for monitoring oceans
with changing climates [1]. In the task of detecting ships, SAR
will not be affected by the changeable ocean weather, and it
can monitor the ship targets in all directions in real time [2].
Deep learning techniques have been incorporated into
many remote sensing applications, such as object and oil spill
detection, traffic monitoring, terrain mapping, coastline
monitoring, and marine fisheries management. Among them,
object detection has always been a research hotspot in the field
of remote sensing. With the rapid development of deep
learning theory and technology, the performance of object
detection based on deep learning far exceeds that of traditional
methods. General deep learning-based object detection
algorithms are divided into two-stage algorithms such as faster
region-based convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN)
[3] and single-stage algorithms such as RetinaNet [4] and you
only look once (YOLO) [5]. The YOLO is a commonly-used
single-stage target detection algorithm, which has the
characteristics of fast speed and high accuracy. It shows
satisfactory performance in detecting small targets and
occluded targets in complex environments, and the detection
speed is better than other deep learning algorithms.
The YOLOv7 [6] is the latest detector in the YOLO series.
The network is designed with a trainable bag-of-freebies that
enables real-time detectors to greatly improve the accuracy
*Corresponding author
This work was supported in part by the NRF of Korea grant funded by
the MSIT (2020R1A2C2010006), and by the MSIT under the ITRC support
program (IITP-2022-2018-0-01424) supervised by the IITP.
978-1-6654-5645-6/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE
School of Electronic Engineering
Soongsil University
Seoul 06978, Korea
Email: yashin@ssu.ac.kr
without increasing the cost of inference. It also involves the
extend-and-compound scaling, so the object detector can
effectively reduce the number of parameters and computation,
and thus greatly improve the detection speed. In this paper,
based on the latest version YOLOv7, we conduct training
optimization for the characteristics of the SAR ship detection.
The high resolution SAR images dataset (HRSID) [7] and
SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) [8] are used for verifying
the effectiveness and the applicability of the proposed scheme.
II. METHODOLOGY
A. Overview of the Proposed Method
In this work, the latest version of the YOLO object
detection method is used to detect SAR ship targets. Figure 1
demonstrates the overall process of the SAR ship detection
scheme based on the YOLOv7 method.
Fig. 1. The proposed YOLOv7 based SAR ship detection scheme.
B. Architecture of the Modified Network
The YOLOv7 is a single-stage method that consists of four
parts: input, backbone, head and prediction as shown in Fig. 2.
The backbone part is the feature extraction network of the
YOLOv7. The features extracted from the input image can be
called the feature layer, which is the feature set of the input
image. In the backbone part, we obtained three feature layers
for the next step of network construction.
Feature pyramid network (FPN) [9] is the enhanced
feature extraction network of the YOLOv7. The three
effective feature layers obtained in the backbone part will
perform feature fusion in this part. The purpose of feature
fusion is to combine feature information of different scales. In
the YOLOv7, the path aggregation network (PANet) [10]
structure is used. We not only do up-sample but also down-
sample the features to achieve feature fusion.
Head is the classifier and regressor of the YOLOv7.
Through backbone and FPN, we can already obtain three
enhanced effective feature layers with independent width,
height and number of channels. The feature map can be
regarded as a collection of feature points one after another.
There are three prior frames on each feature point, and each a
prior frame has the number of channel features. What head
actually does is to judge the feature points and judge whether
there is an object corresponding to the prior frame on the
feature points.
744 ICAIIC 2023
 Backbone Components
CBS CBS CBS CBS ELAN MP1 ELAN MP1 ELAN MP1 ELAN
ELAN CBS CBS CBS CBS CBS Concat CBS
CBS
Input
CBS
Components CBS

SPPCSPC Concat ELAN-H REP CONV

CBS CBS CBS CONV BN SiLU
ELAN-H CBS CBS CBS CBS CBS Concat CBS
UP MP2

UP CBS Upsample Concat ELAN-H REP CONV CBS

ELAN-H Concat CBS Maxpool

Maxpool CBS
UP MP2 CBS Maxpool Concat CBS CBS Concat CBS
MP1 Concat SPPCSPC
CBS CBS Concat CBS Maxpool

ELAN-H REP CONV

CBS
Head

Fig. 2. The network architecture based on the YOLOv7, which consists of four blocks: input, backbone, head and prediction. Components part list CBS,
MP, ELAN, ELAN-H, and SPPCSPC in detail.
As shown in Fig. 2, an innovative multi-branch stacking
structure is used for feature extraction. Compared with 𝐿𝑜𝑠𝑠 = 𝐿𝑐𝑙𝑠 + 𝐿𝑟𝑒𝑔 + 𝐿𝑜𝑏𝑗  ()
previous YOLO models, the skip connection structure of the
model is denser. An innovative down-sampling structure is In the YOLOv7, the matching process of positive samples
adopted, max pooling and convolution with a stride size of during training can be divided into two parts. Firstly, for each
2 × 2 are used for feature parallel extraction and compression. ground truth frame, a prior frame and feature points are
Auxiliary branch-assisted convergence is used, but not in the roughly matched by coordinates, width and height. Secondly,
YOLOv7 and YOLOv7-x, which have smaller models. we use SimOTA[15] to adaptively select the number of prior
boxes corresponds to each ground truth box. The positive
In addition, a special spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) sample matching is to find out which prior boxes are
structure is proposed in the YOLOv7 as improvement. The considered to have corresponding ground truth boxes, and it is
SPP [11] expanded receptive field with cross stage partial responsible for the prediction of ground truth boxes.
network (CSP) [12] mechanism is used, and the CSP structure
is introduced into the SPP structure. This module has a large In order to improve the training efficiency of the model,
residual edge to assist optimization and feature extraction. the number of positive samples was increased in the YOLOv7.
During the training, each ground truth box could be predicted
Drawing on the re-parameterization visual geometry by multiple prior boxes. In addition, for each ground truth box,
group (RepVGG) [13] structure, the YOLOv7 introduces the intersection over union (IoU) and type will be calculated
RepConv and fuses it into a specific part of the network and according to the adjusted prediction box of the prior box to
then reduce the number of parameters in the network after obtain the loss value, and then the prior box most suitable for
ensuring network. Like the previous version of YOLO, the the ground truth box will be found.
decoupling head used by the YOLOv7 is together, that is,
classification and regression are implemented in a 1 × 1 III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
convolution.
A. Dataset and Training Strategy
Therefore, the work of the whole YOLOv7 network is We use the HRSID [7] and SSDD [8] to verify the
feature extraction - feature enhancement - prediction of the performance of the proposed method. The HRSID is widely
object situation corresponding to the prior frame. used for ship detection and instance segmentation, consisting
C. Loss Function of Sentinel-1 and TerraSAR-X images with resolutions of
0.5m, 1.0m, and 3.0m, which contains 5,604 high-resolution
The overall loss function is consistent with the YOLOv5 SAR images and 16,591 ship instances. It draws on the
[14]. The loss of the network is composed of a classification construction process of the COCO [16] datasets, including
loss, a regression loss and an object loss. The classification SAR images with different resolutions, polarizations, sea
loss is the type of object contained in the feature point, the conditions, sea areas, and coastal ports, which is a benchmark
regression loss is the regression parameter judgment of the for researchers to evaluate their approaches. We randomly
feature point, the object loss is the judgment of whether the divide images into a training set, a validation set and a test set
feature point contains an object. During the training process, as 7:1:2. The SSDD is the first open dataset in the field of SAR
the overall objective function can be described as ship detection and consists of 1,160 images with 2,456 ship

TABLE I. RESULTS OF THE HRSID

Models Precision Recall mAP@0.5 mAP@0.5:0.9 Model size (MB) Speed (sec)
YOLOv7 0.844 0.700 0.786 0.481 74.7 0.279
YOLOv7-tiny 0.819 0.713 0.773 0.456 12.2 0.191
YOLOv7-d6 0.479 0.691 0.399 0.194 306.5 6.700
YOLOv7-e6 0.668 0.695 0.568 0.302 221.3 0.548
YOLOv7-w6 0.848 0.692 0.784 0.449 162.3 0.789
YOLOv7-x 0.803 0.730 0.784 0.464 142.0 0.348

745
 YOLOv7 YOLOv7-tiny YOLOv7-d6 YOLOv7-e6 YOLOv7-w6 YOLOv7-x

(a-1) (b-1) (c-1) (d-1) (e-1) (f-1)

(a-2) (b-2) (c-2) (d-2) (e-2) (f-2)

(a-3) (b-3) (c-3) (d-3) (e-3) (f-3)

(a-4) (b-4) (c-4) (d-4) (e-4) (f-4)

(a-5) (b-5) (c-5) (d-5) (e-5) (f-5)

Fig. 3. Comparison of sample ship detections for the proposed scheme based on the YOLOv7 and extended methods in HRSID.

Ground truth inshore RetinaNet YOLOv5 YOLOv7 YOLOv7-tiny

Ground truth offshore RetinaNet YOLOv5 YOLOv7 YOLOv7-tiny

Fig. 4. Ship detection results obtained by other state-of-the-art methods in SSDD.
targets. All the experiments are conducted on an NVIDIA
RTX 2070 graphics processing unit (GPU) using PyTorch.
The batch size is set to 8 and the number of training epochs
is set to 300. We use the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) as
the optimizer with an initial learning rate of 0.01 and a
momentum of 0.9.
B. Results and Discussion
In this experiment, the precision, the recall and the mean
average precision (mAP) are used to evaluate the detection
performance of the models.
Table 1 lists the results of the HRSID with YOLOv7 and
several extended models. Among them, the original YOLOv7
model can achieve well evaluation values, and the light-
weight YOLOv7 (YOLOv7-tiny) can quickly complete the
detection while ensuring accuracy, providing the possibility
for real-time detection. Figure 3 illustrates several sample
results for visualizing the detection results of the proposed
scheme.
In order to examine the feasibility of the proposed scheme,
the trained model and parameters are used for ship detection
on real SAR images. Figure 4 presents the inshore and

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offshore ship detection sample results which are obtained by
some state-of-the-art methods such as RetinaNet and
YOLOv5. Experimental results show that most of the small-
scale ships can be recognized even without training. At the
same time, large-scale ship recognition is relatively inaccurate,
but some ship features can also be extracted.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this work, a YOLOv7-based SAR ship detection
scheme is proposed after analyzing the existing state-of-the-
art object detection algorithms. Combined with the real SAR
dataset, we tried to detect ship targets fast and accurately in
the complex marine environment. For this purpose, different
versions of the YOLOv7 model were trained and evaluated by
comparing test results. According to the analysis of
experimental results, this method has a good application
prospect in SAR ship detection. At the same time, this study
provides a theoretical reference for the detection of other
maritime objects. The model meets the ship detection
requirements in terms of accuracy and real-time performance,
but the disadvantage is that the recognition accuracy of the
model for large scale ships is low due to the characteristics of
the dataset and the factors of the algorithm itself. In future
work, we plan to combine the proposed method with attention
mechanism or transformer to achieve more accurate detection
and localization of ship of different scales.
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