DRC2-Net: A Context-Aware and Geometry-Adaptive Network for Lightweight SAR Ship Detection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) ship detection remains challenging due to background clutter, target sparsity, and fragmented or partially occluded ships, particularly at small scales. To address these issues, we propose the Deformable Recurrent Criss-Cross Attention Network (DRC2-Net), a lightweight and efficient detection framework built upon the YOLOX-Tiny architecture. The model incorporates two SAR-specific modules: a Recurrent Criss-Cross Attention (RCCA) module to enhance contextual awareness and reduce false positives and a Deformable Convolutional Networks v2 (DCNv2) module to capture geometric deformations and scale variations adaptively. These modules expand the Effective Receptive Field (ERF) and improve feature adaptability under complex conditions. DRC2-Net is trained on the SSDD and iVision-MRSSD datasets, encompassing highly diverse SAR imagery including inshore and offshore scenes, variable sea states, and complex coastal backgrounds. The model maintains a compact architecture with 5.05 M parameters, ensuring strong generalization and real-time applicability. On the SSDD dataset, it outperforms the YOLOX-Tiny baseline with AP@50 of 93.04% (+0.9%), APs of 91.15% (+1.31%), APm of 88.30% (+1.22%), and APl of 89.47% (+13.32%). On the more challenging iVision-MRSSD dataset, it further demonstrates improved scale-aware detection, achieving higher AP across small, medium, and large targets. These results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of DRC2-Net for multi-scale ship detection in complex SAR environments, consistently surpassing state-of-the-art detectors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".