Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is renowned for its all-weather capabilities, exceptional penetration, and high-resolution imaging, making SAR-based ship detection crucial for maritime surveillance and sea rescue operations. However, various challenges, such as blurred ship contours, complex backgrounds, and uneven scale distribution, can impede detection performance improvement. In this study, we propose FastPFM, a novel ship detection model developed to address these challenges. Firstly, we utilize FasterNet as the backbone network to reduce computational redundancy, enhancing feature extraction efficiency and overall computational performance. Additionally, we employ the Feature Bi-level Routing Transformation model (FBM) to obtain global feature information and enhance focus on target regions. Secondly, the PFM module is engineered to collect multi-scale target information effectively by establishing connections across stages, thereby improving fusion of target features. Thirdly, an extra target feature fusion layer is introduced to enhance small ship detection precision and accommodate multi-scale targets. Finally, comprehensive tests on SSDD and HRSID datasets validate FastPFM's efficacy. Compared to the baseline model YOLOX, FastPFM achieves a 5.5% and 4.4% improvement in detection accuracy, respectively. Furthermore, FastPFM demonstrates comparable or superior performance to other detection algorithms, achieving 92.1% and 83.1% accuracy on AP50, respectively.

Existing visual question answering (VQA) methods introduce the Transformer as the backbone architecture for intra- and inter-modal interactions, demonstrating its effectiveness in dependency relationship modeling and information alignment. However, the Transformer’s inherent attention mechanisms tend to be affected by irrelevant information and do not utilize the positional information of objects in the image during the modelling process, which hampers its ability to adequately focus on key question words and crucial image regions during answer inference. Considering this issue is particularly pronounced on the visual side, this paper designs a Knowledge-driven Two-stage Modulation self-attention mechanism to optimize the internal interaction modeling of image sequences. In the first stage, we integrate textual context knowledge and the geometric knowledge of visual objects to modulate and optimize the query and key matrices. This effectively guides the model to focus on visual information relevant to the context and geometric knowledge during the information selection process. In the second stage, we design an information comprehensive representation to apply a secondary modulation to the interaction results from the first modulation. This further guides the model to fully consider the overall context of the image during inference, enhancing its global understanding of the image content. On this basis, we propose a Knowledge-driven Two-stage Modulation Network (KTMN) for VQA, which enables fine-grained filtering of redundant image information while more precisely focusing on key regions. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on the datasets VQA v2 and CLEVR yielded Overall accuracies of 71.36% and 99.20%, respectively, providing ample validation of the proposed method’s effectiveness and rationality. Source code is available at https://github.com/shijingya/KTMN .

Due to the advantages of all-weather capability and high resolution, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image ship detection has been widely applied in the military, civilian, and other domains.However, SAR-based ship detection suffers from limitations such as strong scattering of targets, multiple scales, and background interference, leading to low detection accuracy.To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel SAR ship detection method, NAS-YOLOX, which leverages the efficient feature fusion of the neural architecture search feature pyramid network (NAS-FPN) and the effective feature extraction of the multi-scale attention mechanism.Specifically, NAS-FPN replaces the PAFPN in the baseline YOLOX, greatly enhances the fusion performance of the model's multi-scale feature information, and a dilated convolution feature enhancement module (DFEM) is designed and integrated into the backbone network to improve the network's receptive field and target information extraction capabilities.Furthermore, a multi-scale channel-spatial attention (MCSA) mechanism is conceptualised to enhance focus on target regions, improve small-scale target detection, and adapt to multi-scale targets.Additionally, extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets, HRSID and SSDD, demonstrate that NAS-YOLOX achieves comparable or superior performance compared to other state-ofthe-art ship detection models and reaches best accuracies of 91.1% and 97.2% on AP 0.5 , respectively.