SIVED: A SAR Image Dataset for Vehicle Detection Based on Rotatable Bounding Box

Abstract

The research and development of deep learning methods are heavily reliant on large datasets, and there is currently a lack of scene-rich datasets for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image vehicle detection. To address this issue and promote the development of SAR vehicle detection algorithms, we constructed the SAR Image dataset for VEhicle Detection (SIVED) using Ka, Ku, and X bands of data. Rotatable bounding box annotations were employed to improve positioning accuracy, and an algorithm for automatic annotation was proposed to improve efficiency. The dataset exhibits three crucial properties: richness, stability, and challenge. It comprises 1044 chips and 12,013 vehicle instances, most of which are situated in complex backgrounds. To construct a baseline, eight detection algorithms are evaluated on SIVED. The experimental results show that all detectors achieved high mean average precision (mAP) on the test set, highlighting the dataset’s stability. However, there is still room for improvement in the accuracy with respect to the complexity of the background. In summary, SIVED fills the gap in SAR image vehicle detection datasets and demonstrates good adaptability for the development of deep learning algorithms.