YOLO-Ships: Lightweight ship object detection based on feature enhancement

Due to the influences of complex shore-based backgrounds, ship scale changes and occlusions, most deep learning-based ship target detection algorithms yield false and missed detections, and the number of required model parameters is large. Therefore, we present a lightweight and effective method called YOLO-Ships. An improved lightweight Ghost module was used to enhance the ability of the network to extract ship features. In addition, we designed a ship feature enhancement module and a lightweight C3REGhost module to strengthen the important feature information and improve the detection ability and localization accuracy of the model. Finally, the model loss function was redesigned to improve the convergence speed and accuracy of the model. Our experimental results showed that the mAP@0.5 increased by 5.2% and the number of parameters decreased by 2.89 M compared to those of YOLOv5s, effectively achieving a balance between model lightweightness and good ship detection accuracy.