AJANet: SAR Ship Detection Network Based on Adaptive Channel Attention and Large Separable Kernel Adaptation

Due to issues such as low resolution, scattering noise, and background clutter, ship detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images remains challenging, especially in inshore regions, where these factors have similar scattering characteristics. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel SAR ship detection framework that integrates adaptive channel attention with large kernel adaptation. The proposed method improves multi-scale contextual information extraction by enhancing feature map interactions at different scales. This method effectively reduces false positives, missed detections, and localization ambiguities, especially in complex inshore environments. Also, it includes an adaptive channel attention block that adjusts attention weights according to the dimensions of the input feature maps, enabling the model to prioritize local information and improve sensitivity to small object features in SAR images. In addition, a large kernel attention block with adaptive kernel size is introduced to automatically adjust the receptive field designed to extract abundant context information at different detection layers. Experimental evaluations on the SSDD and Hysid SAR ship datasets indicate that our method achieves excellent detection performance compared to current methods, as well as demonstrate its effectiveness in overcoming SAR ship detection challenges.