Ship Detection Research Articles

Tiny Ship Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Tiny Ship Detection in Remote Sensing Images

EMO-YOLO: a lightweight ship detection model for SAR images based on YOLOv5s

EMO-YOLO: a lightweight ship detection model for SAR images based on YOLOv5s

WDFA-YOLOX: A Wavelet-Driven and Feature-Enhanced Attention YOLOX Network for Ship Detection in SAR Images

Ships are important targets for modern naval warfare detection and reconnaissance. The accurate detection of ships contributes to the maintenance of maritime rights and interests and the realisation of naval strategy. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image detection tasks play a vital role in ship detection, which has consistently been a research hotspot in the field of SAR processing. Although significant progress has been achieved in SAR ship detection techniques using deep learning methods, some challenges still persist. Natural images and SAR images significantly diverge in imaging mechanisms and scattering characteristics. In complex background environments, ships exhibit multiscale variations and dense arrangements, and numerous small-sized ships may be present, culminating in false or missed detections. To address these issues, we propose a novel SAR ship detection network, namely, a Wavelet-Driven Feature-Enhanced Attention–You Only Look Once X (WDFA-YOLOX) network. Firstly, we propose a Wavelet Cascade Residual (WCR) module based on the traditional image processing technique wavelet transform, which is embedded within an improved Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) module, culminating in the formation of the effective wavelet transform-based SPP module (WSPP). The WSPP compensates for the loss of fine-grained feature information during pooling, enhancing the capability of the network to detect ships amidst complex background interference. Secondly, a Global and Local Feature Attention Enhancement (GLFAE) module is proposed, leveraging a parallel structure that combines convolutional modules with transformer modules to reduce the effect of irrelevant information and effectively strengthens valid features associated with small-sized ships, resulting in a reduction in false negatives in small-sized ship detection. Finally, a novel loss function, the Chebyshev distance-generalised IoU loss function, is proposed to significantly enhance both the precision of the detection box and the network convergence speed. To support our approach, we performed thorough experiments on the SSDD and HRSID, achieving an average precision (AP) of 99.11% and 96.20%, respectively, in ship detection. The experimental results demonstrate that WDFA-YOLOX has significant advantages in terms of detection accuracy, generalisation capability, and detection speed and can effectively realise more accurate detection in SAR images, consistently exhibiting superior performance and application value in SAR ship detection.

Scene-aware data augmentation for ship detection in SAR images

ABSTRACT Ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is widely applied in marine monitoring. In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made significant advances in SAR ship detection. However, the scene imbalance problem, i.e. much more offshore scenes than inshore scenes in SAR images, severely hampers the improvement of detection accuracy. In this article, we propose scene-aware data augmentation to address the problem. First, a novel concept, inshore rate, is introduced to estimate the land area percentage of various scenes in SAR images. We can divide image samples into inshore and offshore ones based on the inshore rate without manual category annotations. Second, to augment inshore samples, we synthesize dummy inshore images by cropping the ground truth bounding boxes (GT bboxes) from offshore images and pasting them onto inshore images. This offline data augmentation strategy can address the scene imbalance problem and improve detection accuracy. The experiments conducted on SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) and Large-Scale SAR Ship Detection Dataset (LS-SSDD) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving detection performance.

SwinYOLOv7: Robust ship detection in complex synthetic aperture radar images

Using satellite-based SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) imagery to detect and track ships is a formidable challenge. However, accurate analysis is hampered by inherent difficulties such as obscured edges, multiple targets, varying dimensions and complex backgrounds. These factors contribute to a poor signal-to-noise ratio. Various artificial intelligence models have been developed to improve these problems, especially with YOLO-based models. To overcome the above challenges and achieve robust performance, this study presents a model called SwinYOLOv7, a novel fusion of the YOLOv7 framework with the Features Pyramid Network and the Swin Transformer using ground-breaking anchor-free detection algorithms. This innovative method aims to increase the accuracy of vessel detection while reducing the impact of background clutter. The proposed model improved by YOLOv7 examined three different datasets in detail: SRSDD-v1.0, HRSID, and SSDD to optimize the performance of the model. The training process was consistently verified using superior recall, precision, and F1-score values, which can be easily compared with previous studies. The results show that the model using the Swin Transformer attention mechanism and using an image size of 640×640 achieves the highest accuracy of 96.59%. Alternative attention mechanisms, including the Squeeze-and-Excitation Network (SEnet), the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), Channel Attention (CA) and Efficient Channel Attention (ECA), deliver poorer accuracy rates. The combination of YOLOv7 and Swin Transformer yielded encouraging results that enabled the proposed model to outperform the current benchmarking models. Therefore, the proposed model provides a compelling solution to ensure accurate vessel identification in complex search and rescue scenarios.

FCOS-Based Anchor-Free Ship Detection Method for Consumer Electronic UAV Systems

FCOS-Based Anchor-Free Ship Detection Method for Consumer Electronic UAV Systems

YOLO-Ships: Lightweight ship object detection based on feature enhancement

Due to the influences of complex shore-based backgrounds, ship scale changes and occlusions, most deep learning-based ship target detection algorithms yield false and missed detections, and the number of required model parameters is large. Therefore, we present a lightweight and effective method called YOLO-Ships. An improved lightweight Ghost module was used to enhance the ability of the network to extract ship features. In addition, we designed a ship feature enhancement module and a lightweight C3REGhost module to strengthen the important feature information and improve the detection ability and localization accuracy of the model. Finally, the model loss function was redesigned to improve the convergence speed and accuracy of the model. Our experimental results showed that the mAP@0.5 increased by 5.2% and the number of parameters decreased by 2.89 M compared to those of YOLOv5s, effectively achieving a balance between model lightweightness and good ship detection accuracy.

An explainable embedded neural system for on-board ship detection from optical satellite imagery

Automatic ship detection from spaceborne systems such as satellites or aircrafts, raises considerable attention in sea surface monitoring because of the several applications in military and civilian field. In this context, processing satellite images on-board would reduce the latency time especially for emergency situations. In this paper, an hardware-oriented (HO) ship detection system based on a customized Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), here referred to as HO-ShipNet, is proposed and tested on a revised version of the “Ships in Satellite Imagery” (SSI) Kaggle dataset, reporting detection accuracy of up to 95%. Furthermore, the explainability of HO-ShipNet is investigated by means of explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) techniques (i.e., Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanation (LIME) and Occlusion Sensitivuty Analysis (OSA)), in order to understand the reasoning behind the HO-ShipNet decisions by detecting the most important input features and consequently ensure the trustworthiness of the model itself. Finally, HO-ShipNet is also implemented on the heterogeneous Xilinx xc7z045ffg900-2 SoC Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) outperforming state-of-the-art FPGA-based accelerators dealing with high-resolution frames. The promising results encourage the potential deployment of the proposed system for on-board applications.

HyBNN: Quantifying and Optimizing Hardware Efficiency of Binary Neural Networks

Binary neural network (BNN), where both the weight and the activation values are represented with one bit, provides an attractive alternative to deploy highly efficient deep learning inference on resource-constrained edge devices. However, our investigation reveals that, to achieve satisfactory accuracy gains, state-of-the-art (SOTA) BNNs, such as FracBNN and ReActNet, usually have to incorporate various auxiliary floating-point components and increase the model size, which in turn degrades the hardware performance efficiency. In this article, we aim to quantify such hardware inefficiency in SOTA BNNs and further mitigate it with negligible accuracy loss. First, we observe that the auxiliary floating-point (AFP) components consume an average of 93% DSPs, 46% LUTs, and 62% FFs, among the entire BNN accelerator resource utilization. To mitigate such overhead, we propose a novel algorithm-hardware co-design, called FuseBNN , to fuse those AFP operators without hurting the accuracy. On average, FuseBNN reduces AFP resource utilization to 59% DSPs, 13% LUTs, and 16% FFs. Second, SOTA BNNs often use the compact MobileNetV1 as the backbone network but have to replace the lightweight 3 × 3 depth-wise convolution (DWC) with the 3 × 3 standard convolution (SC, e.g., in ReActNet and our ReActNet-adapted BaseBNN) or even more complex fractional 3 × 3 SC (e.g., in FracBNN) to bridge the accuracy gap. As a result, the model parameter size is significantly increased and becomes 2.25× larger than that of the 4-bit direct quantization with the original DWC (4-Bit-Net); the number of multiply-accumulate operations is also significantly increased so that the overall LUT resource usage of BaseBNN is almost the same as that of 4-Bit-Net. To address this issue, we propose HyBNN , where we binarize depth-wise separation convolution (DSC) blocks for the first time to decrease the model size and incorporate 4-bit DSC blocks to compensate for the accuracy loss. For the ship detection task in synthetic aperture radar imagery on the AMD-Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA, HyBNN achieves a detection accuracy of 94.8% and a detection speed of 615 frames per second (FPS), which is 6.8× faster than FuseBNN+ (94.9% accuracy) and 2.7× faster than 4-Bit-Net (95.9% accuracy). For image classification on the CIFAR-10 dataset on the AMD-Xilinx Ultra96-V2 FPGA, HyBNN achieves 1.5× speedup and 0.7% better accuracy over SOTA FracBNN.

Ship Detection in Maritime Scenes under Adverse Weather Conditions

Point cloud-based detection focuses on land traffic, rarely marine, facing issues with ships: it struggles in bad weather due to reliance on adverse weather data and fails to detect ships effectively due to overlooking size and appearance differences. Addressing the above challenges, our work introduces point cloud data of marine scenarios under realistically simulated adverse weather conditions and a dedicated Ship Detector tailored for marine environments. To adapt to various maritime weather conditions, we simulate realistic rain and fog in collected marine scene point cloud data. Additionally, addressing the issue of losing geometric and height information during feature extraction for large objects, we propose a Ship Detector. It employs a dual-branch sparse convolution layer for extracting multi-scale 3D feature maps, effectively minimizing height information loss. Additionally, a multi-scale 2D convolution module is utilized, which encodes and decodes feature maps and directly employs 3D feature maps for target prediction. To reduce dependency on existing data and enhance model robustness, our training dataset includes simulated point cloud data representing adverse weather conditions. In maritime point cloud ship detection, our Ship Detector, compared to adjusted small object detectors, demonstrates the best performance.

FS-YOLO: a multi-scale SAR ship detection network in complex scenes

FS-YOLO: a multi-scale SAR ship detection network in complex scenes

R-LRBPNet: A Lightweight SAR Image Oriented Ship Detection and Classification Method

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has the advantage of continuous observation throughout the day and in all weather conditions, and is used in a wide range of military and civil applications. Among these, the detection of ships at sea is an important research topic. Ships in SAR images are characterized by dense alignment, an arbitrary orientation and multiple scales. The existing detection algorithms are unable to solve these problems effectively. To address these issues, A YOLOV8-based oriented ship detection and classification method using SAR imaging with lightweight receptor field feature convolution, bottleneck transformers and a probabilistic intersection-over-union network (R-LRBPNet) is proposed in this paper. First, a CSP bottleneck with two bottleneck transformer (C2fBT) modules based on bottleneck transformers is proposed; this is an improved feature fusion module that integrates the global spatial features of bottleneck transformers and the rich channel features of C2f. This effectively reduces the negative impact of densely arranged scenarios. Second, we propose an angle decoupling module. This module uses probabilistic intersection-over-union (ProbIoU) and distribution focal loss (DFL) methods to compute the rotated intersection-over-union (RIoU), which effectively alleviates the problem of angle regression and the imbalance between angle regression and other regression tasks. Third, the lightweight receptive field feature convolution (LRFConv) is designed to replace the conventional convolution in the neck. This module can dynamically adjust the receptive field according to the target scale and calculate the feature pixel weights based on the input feature map. Through this module, the network can efficiently extract details and important information about ships to improve the classification performance of the ship. We conducted extensive experiments on the complex scene SAR dataset SRSDD and SSDD+. The experimental results show that R-LRBPNet has only 6.8 MB of model memory, which can achieve 78.2% detection accuracy, 64.2% recall, a 70.51 F1-Score and 71.85% mAP on the SRSDD dataset.

Research on Laser Dual-Mode Fusion Detection Method of Ship Wake Bubbles

Addressing the issues of weak echo signals and strong background interference in the laser detection of ships’ wakes, an analysis of the laser backscatter detection characteristics of ships’ wakes has been conducted. Based on the Monte Carlo method, a simulation model for the dual-mode fusion detection of ship wake bubbles using laser technology was constructed under different target characteristics. A dual-mode fusion detection system for ships’ wakes was designed, and an indoor experimental platform for the dual-mode fusion detection of ship wake bubbles using laser technology was established. To address problems such as a wide range of echo signal intensity changes, severe signal fluctuations, low resolution, poor image contrast, and blurred target edge information, an algorithm based on multi-timescale hierarchical fusion signal processing and temporal difference accumulation image processing was proposed. Verification experiments for ship wake detection were conducted, which revealed that the dual-mode fusion detection method for ship wake bubbles using laser technology can effectively enhance the detection signal-to-background ratio and counter the maneuvering evasion of underwater weapons by ships. It achieved high sensitivity, large dynamic range, high resolution, and a wide field of view detection and real-time signal processing of ship wake bubble targets of different magnitudes against a strong reverberation background. The effectiveness of the dual-mode fusion detection mode was validated, providing theoretical support for the overall system design and parameter settings.

Voiceprint and position information detection of non-cooperative ship with Φ-OTDR and suspended sensitized optical cable

Target detection is significant in many fields, including oceanic security, marine ecology, etc. In this paper, phase sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) is introduced for the non-cooperative ship detection, with large-scale diversity technology and suspended sensitized optical cable. In outfield experiments, the ship’s voiceprint information is obtained in high fidelity, the ship’s power spectrum is analyzed, and the over-top detection is achieved. Moreover, an array orientation method based on adaptive phase difference correction (APDC) is proposed to track the ship, suppressing the delay jitter influence of acoustic transmission underwater. This is the first time that voiceprint information of the non-cooperative ship is high-fidelity acquired and deeply analyzed with Φ-OTDR and suspended sensitized optical cable, which is conducive to the detection and identification of marine targets, and proves the potential of Φ-OTDR in hydroacoustic detection applications.

SSMA-YOLO: A Lightweight YOLO Model with Enhanced Feature Extraction and Fusion Capabilities for Drone-Aerial Ship Image Detection

Due to the unique distance and angles involved in satellite remote sensing, ships appear with a small pixel area in images, leading to insufficient feature representation. This results in suboptimal performance in ship detection, including potential misses and false detections. Moreover, the complexity of backgrounds in remote sensing images of ships and the clustering of vessels also adversely affect the accuracy of ship detection. Therefore, this paper proposes an optimized model named SSMA-YOLO, based on YOLOv8n. First, this paper introduces a newly designed SSC2f structure that incorporates spatial and channel convolution (SCConv) and spatial group-wise enhancement (SGE) attention mechanisms. This design reduces spatial and channel redundancies within the neural network, enhancing detection accuracy while simultaneously reducing the model’s parameter count. Second, the newly designed MC2f structure employs the multidimensional collaborative attention (MCA) mechanism to efficiently model spatial and channel features, enhancing recognition efficiency in complex backgrounds. Additionally, the asymptotic feature pyramid network (AFPN) structure was designed for progressively fusing multi-level features from the backbone layers, overcoming challenges posed by multi-scale variations. Experiments of the ships dataset show that the proposed model achieved a 4.4% increase in mAP compared to the state-of-the-art single-stage target detection YOLOv8n model while also reducing the number of parameters by 23%.

Enhancing object detection and classification using deep learning: A novel approach with annotated dataset and YOLO-C3GTR architecture

In the rapidly evolving field of computer vision, the need for advancements in object detection is paramount. For a variety of reasons, including security, maritime surveillance, and environmental monitoring, the identification and categorization of ships in aerial pictures is an essential component. In this study, two distinctive approaches are proposed to improve the accuracy of ship detection and categorization in satellite imagery. In the beginning, the dataset for ship detection that was provided by Airbus was separated into five distinct categories: oil tanker, bulk carrier, container ship, sand carrier, and general ship class. Setting up this division was done with the idea of increasing the precision of the ship classification in the imagery. Moreover, we deployed the YOLO-C3GTR model, which is part of our Object Detection framework and helped us to distinguish ships using the technique of Object Detection. The application of the methodology that we have proposed has the potential to significantly improve the precision of these systems when they are used in real-world scenarios and to make a novel addition to the field of ship identification and classification. We have used multiple algorithms of YOLOv5 tested on this dataset like TPHYOLOv5, YOLOv5x, YOLOv5l and our proposed architecture YOLO-C3GTR and it surpassed all the existing approaches by the mAP of 0.83. Furthermore, we intend to perform additional research in this field while simultaneously working to improve our technique. A comparison was made between the performance of the model and that of other deep learning approaches. The model was evaluated and trained with the categorized dataset.

Fine-grained ship image classification and detection based on a vision transformer and multi-grain feature vector FPN model

ABSTRACT In naval and civilian domains, meticulous ship classification and detection are paramount. Nevertheless, predominant research has gravitated toward leveraging Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-centered methodologies, often overlooking the diverse granularity inherent in ship samples. In our pursuit to holistically extract features from ship images across varying granularities, we present a transformative architecture: the Vision Transformer and Multi-Grain Feature Vector Feature Pyramid Network (ViT-MGFV-FPN). This model synergistically melds the merits of MGFV-FPN with an augmented Vision Transformer (ViT) for a comprehensive image feature extraction. To cater to the extraction of broader image features whilst sidestepping the innate quadratic complexity of traditional ViT, we unveil an enhanced version christened the Global Swin Transformer. Concurrently, the MGFV-FPN is orchestrated to harness the prowess of CNNs in distilling intricate ship attributes. Rigorous empirical evaluations underscore our model’s superiority in juxtaposition with extant CNN and transformer-based paradigms for nuanced ship categorization.

High-Efficiency and High-Precision Ship Detection Algorithm Based on Improved YOLOv8n

With the development of the intelligent vision industry, ship detection and identification technology has gradually become a research hotspot in the field of marine insurance and port logistics. However, due to the interference of rain, haze, waves, light, and other bad weather, the robustness and effectiveness of existing detection algorithms remain a continuous challenge. For this reason, an improved YOLOv8n algorithm is proposed for the detection of ship targets under unforeseen environmental conditions. In the proposed method, the efficient multi-scale attention module (C2f_EMAM) is introduced to integrate the context information of different scales so that the convolutional neural network can generate better pixel-level attention to high-level feature maps. In addition, a fully-concatenate bi-directional feature pyramid network (Concatenate_FBiFPN) is adopted to replace the simple superposition/addition of feature map, which can better solve the problem of feature propagation and information flow in target detection. An improved spatial pyramid pooling fast structure (SPPF2+1) is also designed to emphasize low-level pooling features and reduce the pooling depth to accommodate the information characteristics of the ship. A comparison experiment was conducted between other mainstream methods and our proposed algorithm. Results showed that our proposed algorithm outperformed other models by achieving 99.4% of accuracy, 98.2% of precision, 98.5% of recall, 99.1% of mAP@.5, and 85.4% of mAP@.5:.95 on the SeaShips dataset.

面向对海监视的舰船目标跟踪与航迹融合数据集

Real-time trajectory association and trajectory fusion in maritime surveillance pose great challenges and remain hot issues in security, regional situation monitoring, and long-range precision strikes for both military and civilian applications. High-quality datasets play a pivotal role in advancing research in target tracking and fusion technologies within this domain. This paper addresses the data requirements for technological research in target tracking and fusion, as well as the limitations of currently available datasets, including data scarcity, inadequate scene design specificity, uniform data formats, and incomplete data descriptions. We used simulation software to emulate multi-sensor multi-target detection data in complex scenarios, so as to present a dataset tailored for typical maritime surveillance scenarios—targeting ships using 2D radar and Electronic Support Measures (ESM) sensors. The simulation software comprises a scenario generator and a sensor simulator, creating a mature target tracking scenario simulation environment with realistic detection data modeling capabilities. The dataset includes data from 2D radar and ESM sensors, covering typical maritime ship categories, supporting configurations with radiation sources. It is designed for a variety of scenarios such as high-speed motion, dense traffic, multi-sensor data fusion, specific ship detection, and cross-positioning. The dataset contains a total of 368,155 target tracks from 101 ships, spanning a duration of 15,000 seconds. The data format conforms to actual equipment reporting scenarios, while the detection error model accurately reflects real-world conditions. Accuracy assessment and data completeness are ensured through various methods including normality testing of data error, scenario testing of detection rate and false alarm rate, as well as field research. This dataset can provide fundamental data for algorithmic research and validation in the ship's target tracking, trajectory fusion and other related areas.

A Ship Detection Method in Infrared Remote Sensing Images Based on Image Generation and Causal Inference

Aiming at the problems of scarce public infrared ship data and the difficulty of obtaining them, a ship image generation method based on improved StyleGAN2 is proposed. The mapping network in StyleGAN2 is replaced with a Variational Auto-Encoder, enabling the generated latent variables to retain original image information while reducing computational complexity. This benefits the construction of the image. Additionally, a self-attention mechanism is introduced to capture dependency information between distant features, generating more detailed object representation. By reducing the number of input noises in the generator, the quality of the generated images is effectively enhanced. Experimental results show that the images generated by the proposed method closely resemble the structure, content and data distribution of the original real images, achieving a higher level of detail. Regarding ship detection methods based on deep learning, they often suffer from complex detection networks, numerous parameters, poor interpretability, and limited real-time performance. To address these issues, a lightweight multi-class ship detection method for infrared remote sensing images is designed. This method aims to improve real-time performance while maintaining accurate ship detection. Based on ship detection, an interpretable ship detection approach based on causal reasoning is presented. By integrating singular value decomposition with the Transformer architecture, the model focuses on causal ship features associated with labels in the images. This enhances the model’s robustness against non-causal information, such as background details, and improves its interpretability.