DiffDet4SAR: Diffusion-based Aircraft Target Detection Network for SAR Images

Abstract

Aircraft target detection in SAR images is a challenging task due to the discrete scattering points and severe background clutter interference. Currently, methods with convolution-based or transformer-based paradigms cannot adequately address these issues. In this letter, we explore diffusion models for SAR image aircraft target detection for the first time and propose a novel \underline{Diff}usion-based aircraft target \underline{Det}ection network \underline{for} \underline{SAR} images (DiffDet4SAR). Specifically, the proposed DiffDet4SAR yields two main advantages for SAR aircraft target detection: 1) DiffDet4SAR maps the SAR aircraft target detection task to a denoising diffusion process of bounding boxes without heuristic anchor size selection, effectively enabling large variations in aircraft sizes to be accommodated; and 2) the dedicatedly designed Scattering Feature Enhancement (SFE) module further reduces the clutter intensity and enhances the target saliency during inference. Extensive experimental results on the SAR-AIRcraft-1.0 dataset show that the proposed DiffDet4SAR achieves 88.4\% mAP$_{50}$, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by 6\%. Code is availabel at \href{https://github.com/JoyeZLearning/DiffDet4SAR}.