# DTKDP: A Dual Teacher Knowledge Distillation and Pruning Framework for Lightweight Oriented SAR Ship Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24872 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24872/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 32 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Network Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06519/) (2017)
- [Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03665/) (2016)
- [ThiNet: A Filter Level Pruning Method for Deep Neural Network Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06342/) (2017)
- [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)
- [RTMDet: An Empirical Study of Designing Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07784/) (2022)
- [R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05612/) (2019)
- [Distilling Object Detectors with Fine-grained Feature Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03609/) (2019)
- [Align Deep Features for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09397/) (2020)
- [Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13256/) (2020)
- [Focal and Global Knowledge Distillation for Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11837/) (2021)
- [Gate Decorator: Global Filter Pruning Method for Accelerating Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08174/) (2019)
- [MMRotate: A Rotated Object Detection Benchmark using PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13317/) (2022)
- [Masked Generative Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01529/) (2022)
- [Localization Distillation for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12252/) (2021)
- [CrossKD: Cross-Head Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11369/) (2023)
- [PKD: General Distillation Framework for Object Detectors via Pearson Correlation Coefficient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02039/) (2022)
- [Distilling Object Detectors with Feature Richness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00674/) (2021)
- [ARS-DETR: Aspect Ratio-Sensitive Detection Transformer for Aerial Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04989/) (2023)
- [RT-DETRv3: Real-time End-to-End Object Detection with Hierarchical Dense Positive Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08475/) (2024)
- [Light-Head R-CNN: In Defense of Two-Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07264/) (2017)
- [MTKD: Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09571/) (2024)
- [FCOSR: A Simple Anchor-free Rotated Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10780/) (2021)
- [Learning Polar Encodings for Arbitrary-Oriented Ship Detection in SAR Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13151/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Two-stage oriented detectors achieve high localization accuracy in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection, but their large backbones, feature pyramids, proposal modules, and heavy region of interest (RoI) heads hinder deployment. Existing lightweight SAR ship detectors typically use one-stage frameworks that lack proposal-level refinement for precise rotated localization. This paper presents a dual-teacher knowledge distillation and pruning (DTKDP) framework for lightweight oriented SAR ship detection. DTKDP introduces learnable gates into convolutional, normalization, and linear layers to prune convolutional channels and RoI-head neurons. Rotated proposal alignment (RPA) distills teacher and student predictions in a shared teacher-generated rotated proposal space, while a dual-teacher scheme combines classification and regression guidance from a homogeneous main teacher with complementary classification cues from a heterogeneous auxiliary teacher. Experiments on the SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) and Rotated Ship Detection Dataset in SAR Images (RSDD-SAR) show that DTKDP reduces the parameters of Oriented Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Oriented R-CNN) and RoI Transformer equipped with ResNet-50 backbones by 87.5-91.8% and their floating-point operations (FLOPs) by 75.6-79.9%. In terms of average precision (AP) and mean average precision (mAP), the resulting Oriented R-CNN-slim and RoI Transformer-slim retain accuracy close to their full-scale counterparts. Relative changes across AP50, AP75, mAP50:75, and mAP50:95 range from a 2.38% decrease to a 0.65% improvement. Compared with RTMDet-tiny, they improve all four metrics on both datasets by 0.52-27.55% and consistently surpass representative distillation methods, demonstrating a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.