Deep Learning for Vessel Detection and Identification From Spaceborne Optical Imagery

Abstract

Abstract. We present a deep learning-based vessel detection and (re-)identification approach from spaceborne optical images. We introduce these two components as part of a maritime surveillance from space pipeline and present experimental results on challenging real-world maritime datasets derived from WorldView imagery. First, we developed a vessel detection model based on RetinaNet achieving a performance of 0.795 F1-score on a challenging multi-scale dataset. We then collected a large-scale dataset for vessel identification by applying the detection model on 200+ optical images, detecting the vessels therein and assigning them an identity via an Automatic Identification System association framework. A vessel re-identification model based on Twin neural networks has then been trained on this dataset featuring 2500+ unique vessels with multiple repeated occurrences across different acquisitions. The model allows to naturally establish similarities between vessel images. It returns a relevant ranking of candidate vessels from a database when provided an input image for a specific vessel the user might be interested in, with top-1 and top-10 accuracies of 38.7% and 76.5%, respectively. This study demonstrates the potential offered by the latest advances in deep learning and computer vision when applied to optical remote sensing imagery in a maritime context, opening new opportunities for automated vessel monitoring and tracking capabilities from space.

Automatic Deployment of Convolutional Neural Networks on FPGA for Spaceborne Remote Sensing Application

“…Meanwhile, benefiting from the tremendous development in deep learning and computer vision, many convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have been proposed for remote sensing image processing and greatly improve the efficiency of extracting useful information from remote sensing images, thereby promoting the rapid development of scene classification and object detection based on spaceborne remote sensing images [2][3][4]. Therefore, spaceborne remote sensing is increasingly used in ship detection [5,6], cloud detection [7,8], land-cover classification [9,10], and other applications.…”