Entropy-Based re-sampling method on SAR class imbalance target detection

Detection tasks based on Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images have been studied widely but severely constrained by the quality of datasets. Meanwhile, both the unperceived category imbalance problem and SAR image discrepancy of multi-class SAR datasets are not fully considered. Researchers usually care about the foreground-background imbalance more than the class imbalance for SAR images. To solve these problems, an entropy-based re-sampling method is proposed in which category imbalance and quality discrepancies of SAR images are both considered. Initially, the relationship is established between variance-weighted image entropy and factors affecting SAR image quality, such as noise, resolution, and density, thereby validating entropy as a robust metric for image quality assessment. Subsequently, quantity penalty scores of categories and difficulty penalty scores of each image are calculated separately to capture the inter-class and intra-class disparities. Next, logarithmic smoothing is employed to avoid overestimation of image difficulty due to the margin effect. Finally, all these scores are combined to generate normalized scores representing the final distribution of the dataset to guide the training process. The proposed approach serves as a plug-and-play strategy for general SAR detection tasks, and experimental results indicate a significant performance improvement. Specifically, detection accuracy in terms of AP for airplanes and bridges (minority classes) in the MSAR dataset is improved by 16.6 % and 13.0 %, respectively, compared to the YOLOv5 baseline, with only a minimal 1.6 % sacrifice in ship detection (majority class). The datasets and the codes can be found at https://www.radars.ac.cn/web/data/getData?dataType=MSAR, https://github.com/Phoenix0qi/Yolov5-entropy-balance/tree/master.