Hyperparameter Configuration Learning for Ship Detection From Synthetic Aperture Radar Images
Nuo Xu, Chunlei Huo, Xin Zhang, Yong Cao, Chunhong Pan · IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters · 2021
Detecting ships from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is inherently subject to its imaging mechanism. With the development of deep learning, advanced learning-based techniques have been migrated from optical images to SAR images. However, the default hyperparameters (e.g., learning rate, size of the anchor box) predefined by a heuristic strategy on optical images might be suboptimal for SAR datasets. In addition, the low-quality imaging in SAR images further reduces the portability of hyperparameters. To solve this problem, a new optimization method, named reinforcement learning and hyperband (RLH), is proposed to dynamically learn hyperparameter configurations by deep reinforcement learning (DRL), where a neural network is adopted to capture the relationship between different configurations and predict new configurations to further improve the performance. Hyperparameter configuration is able to be automatically learned to accommodate various SAR image datasets, and experiments on two SAR image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed approach.