Abstract
Ship detection and angle estimation in SAR images play an important role in marine surveillance. Previous works have detected ships first and estimated their orientations second. This is time-consuming and tedious. In order to solve the problems above, we attempt to combine these two tasks using a convolutional neural network so that ships may be detected and their orientations estimated simultaneously. The proposed method is based on the original SSD (Single Shot Detector), but using a rotatable bounding box. This method can learn and predict the class, location, and angle information of ships using only one forward computation. The generated oriented bounding box is much tighter than the traditional bounding box and is robust to background disturbances. We develop a semantic aggregation method which fuses features in a top-down way. This method can provide abundant location and semantic information, which is helpful for classification and location. We adopt the attention module for the six prediction layers. It can adaptively select meaningful features and neglect weak ones. This is helpful for detecting small ships. Multi-orientation anchors are designed with different sizes, aspect ratios, and orientations. These can consider both speed and accuracy. Angular regression is embedded into the existing bounding box regression module, and thus the angle prediction is output with the position and score, without requiring too many extra computations. The loss function with angular regression is used for optimizing the model. AAP (average angle precision) is used for evaluating the performance. The experiments on the dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Highlights
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is active radar that can provide high resolution images under all weather conditions
We use the SSDD with rotatable bounding boxes to train and test the detector
We find that the proposed method can simultaneously detect and estimate the angle in a single forward convolutional neural network computation, with an oriented bounding box which is a better fit with the ships in SAR images
Summary
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is active radar that can provide high resolution images under all weather conditions. SAR images have been widely used for fishing vessel detection, ship traffic monitoring, and immigration control [1,2]. Numerous studies have been performed to detect ships in SAR images [3,4,5,6,7]. The ship detection methods used in SAR images are usually inherited from the optical remote sensing domain. (3) object-based image analysis (OBIA)-based object detection methods; and (4) machine learning-based object detection methods. Machine learning-based methods usually have better performance compared with the other three detectors. They extract the candidate object features, such as the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) [11], scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) [12], and bag-of-words
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