# SARDet-100K: Towards Open-Source Benchmark and ToolKit for Large-Scale SAR Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06534 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06534/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Cascade R-CNN: High Quality Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09756/) (2019)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [Visual Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09741/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Classification and Localization for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06493/) (2019)
- [Large Selective Kernel Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09030/) (2023)
- [FreeAnchor: Learning to Match Anchors for Visual Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02466/) (2019)
- [Region Proposal by Guided Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03278/) (2019)
- [Grid R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12030/) (2018)
- [Feature Guided Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Learning in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18653/) (2023)
- [YOLO-MS: Rethinking Multi-Scale Representation Learning for Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05480/) (2023)
- [One-Stage Cascade Refinement Networks for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08472/) (2022)
- [Scattering Model Guided Adversarial Examples for SAR Target Recognition: Attack and Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04779/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [VisionLLM v2: An End-to-End Generalist Multimodal Large Language Model for Hundreds of Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08394/) (2024)
- [LSKNet: A Foundation Lightweight Backbone for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11735/) (2024)
- [SARATR-X: Toward Building A Foundation Model for SAR Target Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09365/) (2024)
- [SM3Det: A Unified Model for Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20665/) (2024)
- [RingMo-Agent: A Unified Remote Sensing Foundation Model for Multi-Platform and Multi-Modal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20776/) (2025)
- [RingMoE: Mixture-of-Modality-Experts Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Universal Remote Sensing Image Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03166/) (2025)
- [SARLANG-1M: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Modeling in SAR Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03254/) (2025)
- [Strip R-CNN: Large Strip Convolution for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03775/) (2025)
- [MaDiNet: Mamba Diffusion Network for SAR Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07500/) (2024)
- [OpenEarthMap-SAR: A Benchmark Synthetic Aperture Radar Dataset for Global High-Resolution Land Cover Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10891/) (2025)
- [RSAR: Restricted State Angle Resolver and Rotated SAR Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04440/) (2025)
- [ATRNet-STAR: A Large Dataset and Benchmark Towards Remote Sensing Object Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13354/) (2025)
- [EarthGPT-X: A Spatial MLLM for Multi-level Multi-Source Remote Sensing Imagery Understanding with Visual Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12795/) (2025)
- [M4-SAR: A Multi-Resolution, Multi-Polarization, Multi-Scene, Multi-Source Dataset and Benchmark for optical-SAR Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10931/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Pretraining for Domain-Specific Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17562/) (2025)
- [DenoDet: Attention as Deformable Multi-Subspace Feature Denoising for Target Detection in SAR Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02833/) (2024)
- [SARMAE: Masked Autoencoder for SAR Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16635/) (2025)
- [RGB-Sonar Tracking Benchmark and Spatial Cross-Attention Transformer Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07189/) (2024)
- [Wholly-WOOD: Wholly Leveraging Diversified-quality Labels for Weakly-supervised Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09471/) (2025)
- [SARChat-Bench-2M: A Multi-Task Vision-Language Benchmark for SAR Image Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08168/) (2025)
- [CrossEarth-SAR: A SAR-Centric and Billion-Scale Geospatial Foundation Model for Domain Generalizable Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12008/) (2026)
- [Earth-OneVision: Extending Remote Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models to More Sensor Modalities and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10819/) (2026)
- [SAR-TEXT: A Large-Scale SAR Image-Text Dataset Built with SAR-Narrator and A Progressive Learning Strategy for Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18743/) (2025)
- [FUSAR-KLIP: Towards Multimodal Foundation Models for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23927/) (2025)
- [CRFT: Consistent-Recurrent Feature Flow Transformer for Cross-Modal Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05689/) (2026)
- [DenoDet V2: Phase-Amplitude Cross Denoising for SAR Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09392/) (2025)
- [LightFC-X: Lightweight Convolutional Tracker for RGB-X Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18143/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Enhancement of Forward-Looking Sonar Images: Bridging Cross-Modal Degradation Gaps through Feature Space Transformation and Multi-Frame Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10974/) (2025)
- [SARVLM: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Semantic Understanding in SAR Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22665/) (2025)
- [Unifying Heterogeneous Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Detection Via Language-Pivoted Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01758/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) object detection has gained significant attention recently due to its irreplaceable all-weather imaging capabilities. However, this research field suffers from both limited public datasets (mostly comprising <2K images with only mono-category objects) and inaccessible source code. To tackle these challenges, we establish a new benchmark dataset and an open-source method for large-scale SAR object detection. Our dataset, SARDet-100K, is a result of intense surveying, collecting, and standardizing 10 existing SAR detection datasets, providing a large-scale and diverse dataset for research purposes. To the best of our knowledge, SARDet-100K is the first COCO-level large-scale multi-class SAR object detection dataset ever created. With this high-quality dataset, we conducted comprehensive experiments and uncovered a crucial challenge in SAR object detection: the substantial disparities between the pretraining on RGB datasets and finetuning on SAR datasets in terms of both data domain and model structure. To bridge these gaps, we propose a novel Multi-Stage with Filter Augmentation (MSFA) pretraining framework that tackles the problems from the perspective of data input, domain transition, and model migration. The proposed MSFA method significantly enhances the performance of SAR object detection models while demonstrating exceptional generalizability and flexibility across diverse models. This work aims to pave the way for further advancements in SAR object detection. The dataset and code is available at https://github.com/zcablii/SARDet_100K.