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SCNet-YOLO: a symmetric convolution network for multi-scenario ship detection based on YOLOv7

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Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can work under all-weather and all-day conditions, and it has been widely applied in maritime fields. However, existing algorithms based on SAR still have limitations in ship detection due to the complex scenarios and small-sized targets. In order to solve those problems, a Symmetric Convolution Network based on YOLOv7 (SCNet-YOLO) was proposed for SAR ship target detection. Firstly, we have designed a Symmetric Convolutional structure (SConv), it is highly effective in enhancing the capability of feature extraction for small targets. Secondly, we add the dynamic head to fuse the attention mechanism and better capture the ship targets of various sizes. Finally, the WIoU is used as the loss function to capture the border information while avoiding overfitting. The experiment results show that the SCNet-YOLO proposed in this paper achieves a precision of 93.5% and mAP50:95 of 68.1% on the HRSID, and achieves a precision of 96.1% and mAP50:95 of 71.7% on the SSDD, and it is superior to other state-of-the-art SAR ship detection methods in the overall performance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Key Projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.52331012) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.61404083).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China

    Weina Zhou, Yuqi Yang, Ming Zhao & Wenhua Hu

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  1. Weina Zhou
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  2. Yuqi Yang
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  4. Wenhua Hu
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Contributions

Weina Zhou: Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Supervision, Writing—review & editing, Project administration. Yuqi Yang:Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing—original draft, Visualization Ming Zhao:Supervision, Writing—review & editing; Wenhua Wu: Supervision, Writing – review & editing,project administration.

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Correspondence to Wenhua Hu.

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Zhou, W., Yang, Y., Zhao, M. et al. SCNet-YOLO: a symmetric convolution network for multi-scenario ship detection based on YOLOv7. J Supercomput 81, 630 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-025-07120-1

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