Ship Contour Extraction From SAR Images Based on Faster R-CNN and Chan–Vese Model

Abstract

Compared with most ship detection methods for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, ship contour extraction can provide more of the detailed shape and edge information of an observed ship and play a significant role in sea surface monitoring and marine transportation. In this study, a joint ship contour extraction method (Faster R-CNN, FNLM, and Chan-Vese model; FFCV method) was proposed to obtain detailed ship information from SAR images, including ship detection in complex scenes and contour extraction in target slices. First, Faster R-CNN was employed to slice ships from large-scene SAR images. Then, Fast non-local mean (FNLM) filtering was applied to denoise and enhance the structural information of the target slices. Finally, an optimized Chan-Vese model was proposed in this paper, which can not only accurately extract the contour of the observed ship, but also reduce the computation time of the model. The SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) was selected and finely relabeled to evaluate the contour extraction performance. An evaluation index <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">R_N</i> , including quantitative value and offset direction, was developed to evaluate the extraction accuracy of the target contour from the SAR images. Compared with the Mask R-CNN network, the average contour extraction accuracy index <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">R_N</i> of the proposed FFCV method reached -0.002 on all the images in SSDD dataset, and its results were closer to the real ship contours while maintaining the applicability to complex scenes.