Ship detection based on multi-scale weighted fusion

Ship surveillance plays an important role in ensuring the safety of maritime transportation and navigation. Due to the influence of factors such as waves and special weather, the existing detection methods still cannot balance the accuracy, speed and the parameters of the model in the changeable and complex marine environment. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an improved real-time method based on YOLOv5, which has few parameters and achieves high detection accuracy with little memory and computation cost. Collaborative Attention (CA) mechanism is added to the network structure, which enables the model to more accurately locate and identify target regions. We also design a Spatial Pyramid Pooling module (SPP) and a weighted pyramid network called Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) based on the characteristics of the ships to better fuse feature information. Transformer encoder is introduced to capture long-distance dependencies and preserve global and local features to the greatest extent. Furthermore, the ability of our proposed structure to localize objects at each stage is improved through integrating the output of multiple modules. The experimental results show that, the comprehensive performance of this method is better than the existing technology in ship detection on different evaluation criteria.