Squeeze-and-Excitation Laplacian Pyramid Network With Dual-Polarization Feature Fusion for Ship Classification in SAR Images

This letter proposes a squeeze-and-excitation Laplacian pyramid network with dual-polarization feature fusion (SE-LPN-DPFF) for ship classification in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. SE-LPN-DPFF offers three contributions – 1) dual-polarization (VV and VH) feature fusion (DPFF), 2) channel modeling by the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) to balance each polarization feature’s contribution, and 3) Laplacian pyramid network (LPN) to achieve multi-resolution analysis (MRA). Extensive ablation studies can confirm the effectiveness of each contribution. Results on the three- and six-category OpenSARShip datasets reveal the state-of-the-art SAR ship classification performance.