OptWake-YOLO: a lightweight and efficient ship wake detection model based on optical remote sensing images

IntroductionShip wakes exhibit more distinctive characteristics than vessels themselves, making wake detection more feasible than direct ship detection. However, challenges persist due to sea surface interference, meteorological conditions, and coastal structures, while practical applications demand...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Runxi Qiu, Nan Bi, Chaoyue Yin
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2025-08-01
Series:Frontiers in Marine Science
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2025.1624323/full
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1850052112029843456
author Runxi Qiu
Nan Bi
Chaoyue Yin
author_facet Runxi Qiu
Nan Bi
Chaoyue Yin
author_sort Runxi Qiu
collection DOAJ
description IntroductionShip wakes exhibit more distinctive characteristics than vessels themselves, making wake detection more feasible than direct ship detection. However, challenges persist due to sea surface interference, meteorological conditions, and coastal structures, while practical applications demand lightweight models with fast detection speeds.MethodsWe propose OptWake-YOLO, a lightweight ship wake detection model with three key innovations: A RepConv-based RCEA module in the Backbone combining efficient layer aggregation with reparameterization to enhance feature extraction. An Adaptive Dynamic Feature Fusion Network (ADFFN) in the Neck integrating channel attention with Dynamic Upsampling (Dysample). A Shared Lightweight Object Detection Head (SLODH) using parameter sharing and Group Normalization.ResultsExperiments on the SWIM dataset show OptWake-YOLO improves mAP50 by 1.5% (to 93.2%) and mAP50-95 by 2.9% (to 66.5%) compared to YOLOv11n, while reducing parameters by 40.7% (to 1.6M) and computation by 25.8% (to 4.9 GFLOPs), maintaining 303 FPS speed.DiscussionThe model demonstrates superior performance in complex maritime conditions through: RCEA's multi-branch feature extraction. ADFFN's adaptive multi-scale fusion. SLODH's efficient detection architecture. Ablation studies confirm each component's contribution to balancing accuracy and efficiency for real-time wake detection.
format Article
id doaj-art-523b19f87c344b69a4eadbc5c4e1deaf
institution DOAJ
issn 2296-7745
language English
publishDate 2025-08-01
publisher Frontiers Media S.A.
record_format Article
series Frontiers in Marine Science
spelling doaj-art-523b19f87c344b69a4eadbc5c4e1deaf2025-08-20T02:52:56ZengFrontiers Media S.A.Frontiers in Marine Science2296-77452025-08-011210.3389/fmars.2025.16243231624323OptWake-YOLO: a lightweight and efficient ship wake detection model based on optical remote sensing imagesRunxi QiuNan BiChaoyue YinIntroductionShip wakes exhibit more distinctive characteristics than vessels themselves, making wake detection more feasible than direct ship detection. However, challenges persist due to sea surface interference, meteorological conditions, and coastal structures, while practical applications demand lightweight models with fast detection speeds.MethodsWe propose OptWake-YOLO, a lightweight ship wake detection model with three key innovations: A RepConv-based RCEA module in the Backbone combining efficient layer aggregation with reparameterization to enhance feature extraction. An Adaptive Dynamic Feature Fusion Network (ADFFN) in the Neck integrating channel attention with Dynamic Upsampling (Dysample). A Shared Lightweight Object Detection Head (SLODH) using parameter sharing and Group Normalization.ResultsExperiments on the SWIM dataset show OptWake-YOLO improves mAP50 by 1.5% (to 93.2%) and mAP50-95 by 2.9% (to 66.5%) compared to YOLOv11n, while reducing parameters by 40.7% (to 1.6M) and computation by 25.8% (to 4.9 GFLOPs), maintaining 303 FPS speed.DiscussionThe model demonstrates superior performance in complex maritime conditions through: RCEA's multi-branch feature extraction. ADFFN's adaptive multi-scale fusion. SLODH's efficient detection architecture. Ablation studies confirm each component's contribution to balancing accuracy and efficiency for real-time wake detection.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2025.1624323/fullship wake detectionYOLOv11nRepConvlightweight detectorDySample
spellingShingle Runxi Qiu
Nan Bi
Chaoyue Yin
OptWake-YOLO: a lightweight and efficient ship wake detection model based on optical remote sensing images
Frontiers in Marine Science
ship wake detection
YOLOv11n
RepConv
lightweight detector
DySample
title OptWake-YOLO: a lightweight and efficient ship wake detection model based on optical remote sensing images
title_full OptWake-YOLO: a lightweight and efficient ship wake detection model based on optical remote sensing images
title_fullStr OptWake-YOLO: a lightweight and efficient ship wake detection model based on optical remote sensing images
title_full_unstemmed OptWake-YOLO: a lightweight and efficient ship wake detection model based on optical remote sensing images
title_short OptWake-YOLO: a lightweight and efficient ship wake detection model based on optical remote sensing images
title_sort optwake yolo a lightweight and efficient ship wake detection model based on optical remote sensing images
topic ship wake detection
YOLOv11n
RepConv
lightweight detector
DySample
url https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2025.1624323/full
work_keys_str_mv AT runxiqiu optwakeyoloalightweightandefficientshipwakedetectionmodelbasedonopticalremotesensingimages
AT nanbi optwakeyoloalightweightandefficientshipwakedetectionmodelbasedonopticalremotesensingimages
AT chaoyueyin optwakeyoloalightweightandefficientshipwakedetectionmodelbasedonopticalremotesensingimages