A maritime targets detection method based on hierarchical and multi-scale deep convolutional neural network

The mainstream detection methods Faster R-CNN and SSD are mainly designed for general dataset, but do not emphasize the detection effect of small targets and can not to achieve higher average detection accuracy on general dataset. In order to overcome the problem, we present a target detection method based on hierarchical and multi-scale convolutional neural network aiming at the detection task of maritime targets in complex scenario. To enhance the detection capability of small targets, we extract proposals of different scales in the multi-resolution convolution feature map in the region proposal network. To further improve the detection accuracy, we add an object detection network. The convolution feature maps with high-resolution are used to extract the targets, then an upsampling layer is added to enhance the resolution of the feature maps. The region proposal network and object detection network are then combined to realize the accurate detection of the target. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves good detection results in maritime targets dataset, and the accuracy of target detection outperforms those of the mainstream detection methods.