SAR-DRBNet: Adaptive Feature Weaving and Algebraically Equivalent Aggregation for High-Precision Rotated SAR Detection

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Authors: Lanfang Lei, Sheng Chang, Zhongzhen Sun, Xinli Zheng, Changyu Liao, Wenjun Wei, Long Ma, Ping Zhong
Cited by: 1
References: 52

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is widely used for target detection in complex backgrounds and adverse weather conditions. However, high-precision detection of rotated small targets remains challenging due to severe speckle noise, significant scale variations, and the need for robust rotation-aware representations. To address these issues, we propose SAR-DRBNet, a high-precision rotated small-target detection framework built upon YOLOv13. First, we introduce a Detail-Enhanced Oriented Bounding Box detection head (DEOBB), which leverages multi-branch enhanced convolutions to strengthen fine-grained feature extraction and improve oriented bounding box regression, thereby enhancing rotation sensitivity and localization accuracy for small targets. Second, we design a Ck-MultiDilated Reparameterization Block (CkDRB) that captures multi-scale contextual cues and suppresses speckle interference via multi-branch dilated convolutions and an efficient reparameterization strategy. Third, we propose a Dynamic Feature Weaving module (DynWeave) that integrates global–local dual attention with dynamic large-kernel convolutions to adaptively fuse features across scales and orientations, improving robustness in cluttered SAR scenes. Extensive experiments on three widely used SAR rotated object detection benchmarks (HRSID, RSDD-SAR, and DSSDD) demonstrate that SAR-DRBNet achieves a strong balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency compared with state-of-the-art oriented bounding box detectors, while exhibiting superior cross-dataset generalization. These results indicate that SAR-DRBNet provides an effective and reliable solution for rotated small-target detection in SAR imagery.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Advanced SAR Imaging Techniques Advanced Neural Network Applications Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Applications and Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Remote Sensing
Publisher
MDPI AG
Volume
18
Issue
4
Pages
619–619
Publication date
16 February 2026
Language
EN