Convolution neural network (CNN)-based detectors have shown great performance on ship detections of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. However, the performance of current models has not been satisfactory enough for detecting multiscale ships and small-size ones in front of complex backgrounds. To address the problem, we propose a novel SAR ship detector based on CNN, which consist of three subnetworks: the Fusion Feature Extractor Network (FFEN), Region Proposal Network (RPN), and Refine Detection Network (RDN). Instead of using a single feature map, we fuse feature maps in bottom–up and top–down ways and generate proposals from each fused feature map in FFEN. Furthermore, we further merge features generated by the region-of-interest (RoI) pooling layer in RDN. Based on the feature representation strategy, the CNN framework constructed can significantly enhance the location and semantics information for the multiscale ships, in particular for the small ships. On the other hand, the residual block is introduced to increase the network depth, through which the detection precision could be further improved. The public SAR ship dataset (SSDD) and China Gaofen-3 satellite SAR image are used to validate the proposed method. Our method shows excellent performance for detecting the multiscale and small-size ships with respect to some competitive models and exhibits high potential in practical application.

Lunar crater detection plays an important role in lunar exploration, while machine learning (ML) exhibits promising advantages in the field. However, previous ML works almost all used a single type of lunar map, such as an elevation map (DEM) or orthographic projection map (WAC), to extract crater features; the two types of images have individual limitations on reflecting the crater features, which lead to insufficient feature information, in turn influencing the detection performance. To address this limitation, we, in this work, propose feature complementary of the two types of images and accordingly explore an advanced dual-path convolutional neural network (Dual-Path) based on a U-NET structure to effectively conduct feature integration. Dual-Path consists of a contracting path, bridging path, and expanding path. The contracting path separately extracts features from DEM and WAC images by means of two independent input branches, while the bridging layer integrates the two types of features by 1 × 1 convolution. Finally, the expanding path, coupled with the attention mechanism, further learns and optimizes the feature information. In addition, a special deep convolution block with a residual module is introduced to avoid network degradation and gradient disappearance. The ablation experiment and the comparison of four competitive models only using DEM features confirm that the feature complementary can effectively improve the detection performance and speed. Our model is further verified by different regions of the whole moon, exhibiting high robustness and potential in practical applications.