# Enhancing, Refining, and Fusing: Towards Robust Multi-Scale and Dense Ship Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06053/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Convolutional Neural Networks: Analysis, Applications, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02806/) (2020)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [Align Deep Features for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09397/) (2020)
- [Dynamic R-CNN: Towards High Quality Object Detection via Dynamic Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06002/) (2020)
- [IMAGDressing-v1: Customizable Virtual Dressing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12705/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Classification and Localization for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06493/) (2019)
- [Boosting Consistency in Story Visualization with Rich-Contextual Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02482/) (2024)
- [GiT: Graph Interactive Transformer for Vehicle Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05475/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, celebrated for its high resolution, all-weather capability, and day-night operability, is indispensable for maritime applications. However, ship detection in SAR imagery faces significant challenges, including complex backgrounds, densely arranged targets, and large scale variations. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, Center-Aware SAR Ship Detector (CASS-Det), designed for robust multi-scale and densely packed ship detection. CASS-Det integrates three key innovations: (1) a center enhancement module (CEM) that employs rotational convolution to emphasize ship centers, improving localization while suppressing background interference; (2) a neighbor attention module (NAM) that leverages cross-layer dependencies to refine ship boundaries in densely populated scenes; and (3) a cross-connected feature pyramid network (CC-FPN) that enhances multi-scale feature fusion by integrating shallow and deep features. Extensive experiments on the SSDD, HRSID, and LS-SSDD-v1.0 datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CASS-Det, excelling at detecting multi-scale and densely arranged ships.