MDD-YOLOv8: A Multi-Scale Object Detection Model Based on YOLOv8 for Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

The targets in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are often tiny, irregular, and difficult to detect against complex backgrounds, leading to a high probability of missed or incorrect detections by object detection algorithms. To address this issue and improve the recall rate, we introduce an improved version of YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once), named MDD-YOLOv8. This model is not only fast but also highly accurate, with fewer instances of missed or incorrect detections. Our proposed model outperforms the baseline YOLOv8 in SAR image detection by utilizing dynamic convolution to replace static convolution (DynamicConv) and incorporating a deformable large kernel attention mechanism (DLKA). Additionally, we modify the structure of the FPN-PAN and introduce an extra detection header to better detect tiny objects. Experiments on the MSAR-1.0 dataset demonstrate that MDD-YOLOv8 achieves 87.7% precision, 76.1% recall, 78.9% mAP@50, and 0.81 F1 score. These metrics show an improvement of 8.1%, 6.0%, 6.9%, and 0.07, respectively, compared to the original YOLOv8. Although, MDD-YOLOv8 increases parameters by about 20% and GFLOPs by 53% more than YOLOv8n. To further validate the model’s effectiveness, we conducted generalization experiments on four additional SAR image datasets, proving that MDD-YOLOv8’s performance is robust and universally applicable. In summary, MDD-YOLOv8 is a robust, generalized model with strong potential for industrial applications.