| With the increasing business demands of the maritime transportation industry, the traditional target detection methods can no longer meet the practical needs. Due to the rapid development of satellite remote sensing technology, automatic target identification of ships based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images has significant application potential. In recent years, deep learning techniques have gradually shown their advantages in the field of target detection, especially the YOLO (You Only Look Once) model, which provides a new method for SAR ship target recognition with its high accuracy and computational efficiency. In order to compare the performance of different YOLO models in the field of ship target recognition and their advantages over two-stage deep learning algorithms, this paper firstly summarizes the structure of the YOLO series; secondly, we make a comparative analysis of the current widely used datasets and construct this paper based on the samples of the SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD). The data set of this paper is constructed by relabeling; then the YOLO series model is combined with a two-stage target detection method, Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster RCNN), in terms of accuracy and speed of SAR ship target detection曰finally, on the basis of the YOLOv5 model, the Backbone part is optimized, and a deep learning network for ship target recognition based on the attention mechanism, YOLOv5.SAM, is established. The experimental results based on the SAR ship image dataset established in this paper show that YOLOv5 shows more significant comprehensive advantages in terms of computational accuracy and computational efficiency compared with other YOLO series models, with a mAP value of 0.73, but the recognition accuracy of dense targets needs to be improved. On this basis, the YOLOv5. SAM model proposed in this paper realizes the improvement in both recognition accuracy and detection performance of dense targets, and its mAP value reaches 0.79, which proves the effectiveness of the method in SAR ship target recognition. |