An Incept-TextCNN Model for Ship Target Detection in SAR Range-Compressed Domain

Traditionally, synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-based ship target detection is performed in the image domain, where SAR imaging processing has to be applied first. However, SAR imaging processing is complex and time-consuming, especially in the wide-swath working mode. Actually, for open sea scenes, most echoes are sea surface signals with no ship targets, and there is no need for imaging processing in those areas. Therefore, non-image domain ship target detection is studied in this letter, and a novel Incept-text convolutional neural network (TextCNN) model is proposed for ship target detection in the SAR range-compressed domain (RCD). In the proposed method, the SAR echo data are converted into a 1-D range profile signal first by range compression and mean pooling, and then, the Incept-TextCNN model is proposed and applied, and information about existence of ship targets in relevant range cells will be its output. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method is testified by simulation and real spaceborne SAR data, and the results demonstrate that the proposed model can filter out the invalid range-compressed data of the sea surface area, which can significantly reduce the amount of data for subsequent SAR imaging and ship classification.