Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2025, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (11): 3559-3567.doi: 10.12305/j.issn.1001-506X.2025.11.05

• Electronic Technology • Previous Articles    

Tiny objects detection method for unmanned aerial vehicle ship images based on STOD

Jie JIANG(), Wenjun YAN, Qing LING, Limin ZHANG   

  1. Information Fusion Research Institute,Naval Aviation University,Yantai 264001,China
  • Received:2025-03-14 Accepted:2025-07-24 Online:2025-11-25 Published:2025-12-08
  • Contact: Wenjun YAN E-mail:81348541@qq.com

Abstract:

A ship tiny object detection(STOD )is proposed to address the problem of high proportion of small targets and difficult detection in unmanned aerial vehicle ship images. The algorithm is based on image characteristics, ship features, and combined with target specific scenes, focusing on the difficult problems in unmanned aerial vehicle STOD process. A targeted algorithm model and network framework are designed. Firstly, a lightweight single-stage anchor free network is adopted as the backbone, followed by the introduction of a global attention mechanism to enhance the model’s learning ability for tiny objects. Then, cross-stage partial pyramid aggregation network is designed and the detection head is strengthened to improve the network’s ability to extract target features and detection accuracy. Finally, a vector based distribution focus loss is used in the regression branch to further enhance the detection ability for tiny objects. Experimental verification and comparative analysis indicate that the proposed method improves the detection performance of tiny objects on ships by 2.6% compared to the baseline model average precision, and the frame per second can reach 52.2. Compared with other small target algorithms, it has high detection accuracy and good real-time performance.

Key words: unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), ship image, tiny objects detection, deep learning, global attention mechanism

CLC Number: 

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