Domain Adaptive SAR Wake Detection: Leveraging Similarity Filtering and Memory Guidance

Abstract: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), with its all-weather and wide-area observation capabilities, serves as a crucial tool for wake detection. However, due to its complex imaging mechanism, wake features in SAR images often appear abstract and noisy, posing challenges for accurate annotation. In contrast, optical images provide more distinct visual cues, but models trained on optical data suffer from performance degradation when applied to SAR images due to domain shift. To address this cross-modal domain adaptation challenge, we propose a Similarity-Guided and Memory-Guided Domain Adaptation (termed SimMemDA) framework for unsupervised domain adaptive ship wake detection via instance-level feature similarity filtering and feature memory guidance. Specifically, to alleviate the visual discrepancy between optical and SAR images, we first utilize WakeGAN to perform style transfer on optical images, generating pseudo-images close to the SAR style. Then, instance-level feature similarity filtering mechanism is designed to identify and prioritize source samples with target-like distributions, minimizing negative transfer. Meanwhile, a Feature-Confidence Memory Bank combined with a K-nearest neighbor confidence-weighted fusion strategy is introduced to dynamically calibrate pseudo-labels in the target domain, improving the reliability and stability of pseudo-labels. Finally, the framework further enhances generalization through region-mixed training, strategically combining source annotations with calibrated target pseudo-labels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SimMemDA method can improve the accuracy and robustness of cross-modal ship wake detection tasks, validating the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.