Unleashing Channel Potential: Space-Frequency Selection Convolution for SAR Object Detection

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have achieved remarkable performance in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) object detection, but this comes at the cost of tremendous computational resources, partly due to extracting redundant features within a single convolutional layer. Recent works either delve into model compression methods or focus on the carefully-designed lightweight models, both of which result in performance degradation. In this paper, we propose an efficient convolution module for SAR object detection, called SFS-Conv, which increases feature diversity within each convolutional layer through a shunt-perceive-select strategy. Specifically, we shunt input feature maps into space and frequency aspects. The former perceives the context of various objects by dynamically adjusting receptive field, while the latter captures abundant frequency variations and textural features via fractional Gabor transformer. To adaptively fuse features from space and frequency aspects, a parameter-free feature selection module is proposed to ensure that the most representative and distinctive information are preserved. With SFS-Conv, we build a lightweight SAR object detection network, called SFS-CNet. Experimental results show that SFS-CNet outperforms state-of-the-art (SoTA) models on a series of SAR object detection benchmarks, while simultaneously reducing both the model size and computational cost.