A Real-Time Ship Detector via a Common Camera

Abstract

Advanced radars and satellites, suitable for remote monitoring, inappropriately reach the economical requirements of short-range detection. Compared with far-sightedness skills, common visible-light sensors offer more ample features conducive to distinguishing the classes. Therefore, ship detection based on visible-light cameras should cooperate with remote detection technologies. However, compared with detectors applied in inland transportation, the lack of fast ship detectors, detecting multiple ship classes, is non-negligible. To fill this gap, we propose a real-time ship detector based on fast U-Net and remapping attention (FRSD) via a common camera. The fast U-Net offered compresses features in the channel dimension to decrease the number of training parameters. The remapping attention introduced boosts the performance in various rain–fog weather conditions while maintaining the real-time speed. The ship dataset proposed contains more than 20,000 samples, alleviating the lack of ship datasets containing various classes. Data augmentation of the cross-background is especially proposed to further promote the diversity of the detecting background. In addition, the rain–fog dataset proposed, containing more than 500 rain–fog images, simulates various marine rain–fog scenarios and soaks the testing image to validate the robustness of ship detectors. Experiments demonstrate that FRSD performs relatively robustly and detects 9 classes with an mAP of more than 83%, reaching a state-of-the-art level.