Peer Review History

Original SubmissionApril 17, 2025
Decision Letter - Fatih Uysal, Editor

PONE-D-25-19846M-ReDet: A Mamba-based Method for Remote Sensing Ship Object Detection and Fine-grained RecognitionPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Qin,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Revise the paper based on referee comments. Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 18 2025 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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Kind regards,

Fatih Uysal, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Thank you for stating in your Funding Statement: This work is supported by the Department of Science and Technology of Jilin Province, China [YDZJ202501ZYTS600].Funded studies:Initials of the author who received the award: Liu XuhuiGrant numbers awarded to the author: YDZJ202501ZYTS600Full name of the funder: Jilin Provincial Department of Science and TechnologyURL of the funder website: http://kjt.jl.gov.cn/The sponsors (Jilin Provincial Department of Science and Technology) provided financial support through the grant YDZJ202501ZYTS600, managed by Prof. Wang Jia. However, they did not participate in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. 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Additional Editor Comments:

Revise the paper based on referee comments.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1:  The work is well organised and successfully presented. The following paper sets out a proposal for a new detection algorithm with regard to the identification of ships. It is hypothesised that the study will achieve a higher level of success if the following recommendations are taken into consideration during the process of its update.

1. It is important to note that all tables and graphs in the study were prepared with the mAP metric exclusively. The application of additional overlap metrics is also recommended. It is recommended that metrics such as DSC, IoU,RAVD and HD95 be deployed.

2. It is imperative that references are updated and expanded.

3. It is recommended that the resolution quality of the images is increased, with a view to enhancing their clearness and legibility.

Reviewer #2:  I appreciate the effort put into this manuscript. Addressing the suggested revisions will significantly enhance the clarity and impact of your work. By refining these sections, the manuscript will provide greater value to the research community and result in a more robust and informative publication.

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Reviewer #1: Yes:  Mehmet Süleyman YILDIRIM

Reviewer #2: Yes:  Ozan PEKER

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Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Comments.pdf
Revision 1

Response to the Reviewers’ Comments

Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to improve the manuscript. The authors are grateful for the reviewers’ valuable comments, which have helped us to understand the underlying approach in depth and improved the original manuscript. We think carefully about comments raised by the reviewers and provide an item-by-item list to explain how these comments were addressed.

In the 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes' file, we use the highlighting to mark the modifications. Point-to-point responses to reviewers’ comments are below. Reviewers’ comments are in italics and blue, immediately followed by our response.

Reviewer: 1

Comments to the Author:

The work is well organised and successfully presented. The following paper sets out a proposal for a new detection algorithm with regard to the identification of ships. It is hypothesised that the study will achieve a higher level of success if the following recommendations are taken into consideration during the process of its update.

Response�Thank you very much for your careful review and recognition of our manuscript. We will make cautious revisions based on your feedback. Thank you very much.

Specific comments:

1. It is important to note that all tables and graphs in the study were prepared with the mAP metric exclusively. The application of additional overlap metrics is also recommended. It is recommended that metrics such as DSC, IoU,RAVD and HD95 be deployed.

Response�Thank you very much for your valuable feedback. The mAP is critical in remote sensing object detection tasks. Additionally, the evaluation metrics in the manuscript also utilize AP and Recall. In the loss function, we also use IoU as the training basis for the algorithm. The DSC and other metrics you mentioned are used mainly in the field of image segmentation. Thank you again for your valuable feedback.

2. It is imperative that references are updated and expanded.

Response�Thank you very much for raising the questions in the references. We have revised the format of the references and added some references.

3.It is recommended that the resolution quality of the images is increased, with a view to enhancing their clearness and legibility.

Response�Thank you very much for your valuable feedback. Our minimum image resolution is 1024 × 1024, and the image displayed in the PDF file should be a resized version of the original image. You can download and view the original image in the system. Thank you very much for your efforts and recognition.

Reviewer: 2

Comments to the Author:

I appreciate the effort put into this manuscript. Addressing the suggested revisions will significantly enhance the clarity and impact of your work. By refining these sections, the manuscript will provide greater value to the research community and result in a more robust and informative publication.

Response�Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to improve the manuscript and pointing out the shortcomings in the manuscript. In this iteration, we have revised the manuscript on the following issues.

Specific comments:

1. Abstract: In addition to emphasizing that ship detection in remote sensing imagery is currently a hot topic, it would be beneficial to specify the application domains in which such detection tasks are conducted. Doing so would help the reader better understand the practical relevance of the research question and potentially reveal its target users or beneficiaries. Please specify the image format (RGB,Multispectral,etc.) of the dataset used in the study within the abstract. This information will enhance the clarity and reproducibility of the work.

Response�Thank you very much for your valuable feedback. Adding application areas and image formats to the abstract can indeed improve the clarity of the research. We have added relevant content.

2. Introduction: Please clarify the novelty of the study more explicitly at the end of the Introduction section. Clearly stating the unique contributions will help distinguish this work from existing literature.

Response�Thank you for your efforts during the review process. We have made revisions to the work description and innovative design at the end of the manuscript introduction section.

3. Related work: The content of the Related Work section is expected to align with the statement in your sentence: "The commonly used remote sensing object detection algorithms can be categorized into three classes: the Convolutional Neural Network, the Transformer [1], and the Mamba...". Ensuring coherence between this categorization and the subsequent discussion will improve the clarity and structure of the manuscript.

Response�Thank you very much for your careful review. We have revised the titles of the relevant work sections to align them with the descriptions in the introduction section of the manuscript.

4. Our Work: Under the heading "Optimizing the Loss Function," merely changing the loss function appears inconsistent. Readers may expect an actual optimization method or strategy within this section. It is advisable to either revise the heading to better reflect the content or expand the section to include optimization techniques. In addition to KFIoU Loss, it is recommended to include a information about Focal Loss as well.

Response�We are very grateful for your valuable suggestions. We have revised the title "Optimizing the Loss Function" to "Changing the Loss Function" to avoid confusion for readers. The manuscript also includes a description of Focal loss.

5. Experiment and Result Analysis: Presenting the details under the "Experimental Environment and Parameter Configuration" section in a tabular format would enhance readability and clarity for the reader. Additionally, it is recommended to include resource consumption metrics of your developed model compared to the baseline model, such as RAM usage and training time per epoch. These details will provide a more comprehensive evaluation of the model’s efficiency. Please provide detailed visualizations of the distribution within the datasets using appropriate graphs. This will help readers better understand the data composition and support the validity of the experimental results.

Response�Thank you for your question regarding the experimental configuration and dataset situation. We have added Table 3, which outlines the parameters configuration and resource consumption, and Fig 8 to illustrate the dataset's distribution.

6. Discussion: In the Discussion section, it would be beneficial to mention potential future work, such as leveraging SAR imagery for improved performance and addressing enhancements to cope with adverse weather conditions. Including these aspects could strengthen the manuscript by highlighting promising directions for further research.

Response�Thank you for your suggestion about future work in the discussion section. Indeed, adding possible future application directions and plans can provide readers with more inspiration. We have added some potential future work and application directions in the discussion section.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf
Decision Letter - Fatih Uysal, Editor

M-ReDet: A Mamba-based Method for Remote Sensing Ship Object Detection and Fine-grained Recognition

PONE-D-25-19846R1

Dear Dr. Qin,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Fatih Uysal, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Following a thorough evaluation of the final version of the paper, the responses to the reviewer comments, and the revisions implemented, the manuscript was accepted based on its potential contribution to the literature.

Reviewers' comments:

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Fatih Uysal, Editor

PONE-D-25-19846R1

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Qin,

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on behalf of

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Fatih Uysal

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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