scholarly journals Range-Doppler Based CFAR Ship Detection with Automatic Training Data Selection

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sushil Kumar Joshi ◽  
Stefan V. Baumgartner ◽  
Andre B. C. da Silva ◽  
Gerhard Krieger

Ship detection is an essential maritime security requirement. Current state-of-the-art synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based ship detection methods employ fully focused images. The time-consuming processing efforts required to generate these images make them generally unsuitable for real time applications. This paper proposes a novel real time oriented ship detection strategy applicable to range-compressed (RC) radar data acquired by an airborne radar sensor during linear, circular and arbitrary flight tracks. A constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection threshold is computed in the range-Doppler domain using suitable distribution functions. Detection in range-Doppler has the advantage that principally even small ships with a low radar cross section (RCS) can be detected if they are moving fast enough so that the ship signals are shifted to the exo-clutter region. In order to determine a robust threshold, the ocean statistics have to be described accurately. Bright target peaks in the background ocean data bias the statistics and lead to an erroneous threshold. Therefore, an automatic ocean training data extraction procedure is proposed in the paper. It includes (1) a novel target pre-detection module that removes the bright peaks from the data already in time domain, (2) clutter normalization in the Doppler domain using the remaining samples, (3) ocean statistics estimation and (4) threshold computation. Various sea clutter models are investigated and analyzed in the paper for finding the most suitable models for the RC data. The robustness and applicability of the proposed method is validated using real linearly and circularly acquired radar data from DLR’s (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) airborne F-SAR system.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 786 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang-Lang Chang ◽  
Amare Anagaw ◽  
Lena Chang ◽  
Yi Wang ◽  
Chih-Yu Hsiao ◽  
...  

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery has been used as a promising data source for monitoring maritime activities, and its application for oil and ship detection has been the focus of many previous research studies. Many object detection methods ranging from traditional to deep learning approaches have been proposed. However, majority of them are computationally intensive and have accuracy problems. The huge volume of the remote sensing data also brings a challenge for real time object detection. To mitigate this problem a high performance computing (HPC) method has been proposed to accelerate SAR imagery analysis, utilizing the GPU based computing methods. In this paper, we propose an enhanced GPU based deep learning method to detect ship from the SAR images. The You Only Look Once version 2 (YOLOv2) deep learning framework is proposed to model the architecture and training the model. YOLOv2 is a state-of-the-art real-time object detection system, which outperforms Faster Region-Based Convolutional Network (Faster R-CNN) and Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD) methods. Additionally, in order to reduce computational time with relatively competitive detection accuracy, we develop a new architecture with less number of layers called YOLOv2-reduced. In the experiment, we use two types of datasets: A SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) dataset and a Diversified SAR Ship Detection Dataset (DSSDD). These two datasets were used for training and testing purposes. YOLOv2 test results showed an increase in accuracy of ship detection as well as a noticeable reduction in computational time compared to Faster R-CNN. From the experimental results, the proposed YOLOv2 architecture achieves an accuracy of 90.05% and 89.13% on the SSDD and DSSDD datasets respectively. The proposed YOLOv2-reduced architecture has a similarly competent detection performance as YOLOv2, but with less computational time on a NVIDIA TITAN X GPU. The experimental results shows that the deep learning can make a big leap forward in improving the performance of SAR image ship detection.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 4064 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyung-Ae Park ◽  
Jae-Jin Park ◽  
Jae-Cheol Jang ◽  
Ji-Hyun Lee ◽  
Sangwoo Oh ◽  
...  

The necessity of efficient monitoring of ships in coastal regions has been increasing over time. Multi-satellite observations make it possible to effectively monitor vessels. This study presents the results of ship detection methodology, applied to optical, hyperspectral, and microwave satellite images in the seas around the Korean Peninsula. Spectral matching algorithms are used to detect ships using hyperspectral images with hundreds of spectral channels and investigate the similarity between the spectra and in-situ measurements. In the case of SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images, the Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) algorithm is used to discriminate the vessels from the backscattering coefficients of Sentinel-1B SAR and ALOS-2 PALSAR2 images. Validation results exhibited that the locations of the satellite-detected vessels showed good agreement with real-time location data within the Sentinel-1B coverage in the Korean coastal region. This study presented the probability of detection values of optical and SAR-based ship detection and discussed potential causes of the errors. This study also suggested a possibility for real-time operational use of vessel detection from multi-satellite images based on optical, hyperspectral, and SAR remote sensing, particularly in the inaccessible coastal regions off North Korea, for comprehensive coastal management and sustainability.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1169-1184
Author(s):  
Liang Zhong ◽  
Xiaosheng Liu ◽  
Peng Yang ◽  
Rizhi Lin

AbstractNighttime light remote sensing images show significant application potential in marine ship monitoring, but in areas where ships are densely distributed, the detection accuracy of the current methods is still limited. This article considered the LJ1-01 data as an example, compared with the National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP)/Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) data, and explored the application of high-resolution nighttime light images in marine ship detection. The radiation values of the aforementioned two images were corrected to achieve consistency, and the interference light sources of the ship light were filtered. Then, when the threshold segmentation and two-parameter constant false alarm rate methods are combined, the ships’ location information was with obtained, and the reliability of the results was analyzed. The results show that the LJ1-01 data can not only record more potential ship light but also distinguish the ship light and background noise in the data. The detection accuracy of the LJ1-01 data in both ship detection methods is significantly higher than that of the NPP/VIIRS data. This study analyzes the characteristics, performance, and application potential of the high-resolution nighttime light data in the detection of marine vessels. The relevant results can provide a reference for the high-precision monitoring of nighttime marine ships.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Jiuwu Sun ◽  
Zhijing Xu ◽  
Shanshan Liang

With the rapid development of the marine industry, intelligent ship detection plays a very important role in the marine traffic safety and the port management. Current detection methods mainly focus on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, which is of great significance to the field of ship detection. However, these methods sometimes cannot meet the real-time requirement. To solve the problems, a novel ship detection network based on SSD (Single Shot Detector), named NSD-SSD, is proposed in this paper. Nowadays, the surveillance system is widely used in the indoor and outdoor environment, and its combination with deep learning greatly promotes the development of intelligent object detection and recognition. The NSD-SSD uses visual images captured by surveillance cameras to achieve real-time detection and further improves detection performance. First, dilated convolution and multiscale feature fusion are combined to improve the small objects’ performance and detection accuracy. Second, an improved prediction module is introduced to enhance deeper feature extraction ability of the model, and the mean Average Precision (mAP) and recall are significant improved. Finally, the prior boxes are reconstructed by using the K-means clustering algorithm, the Intersection-over-Union (IoU) is higher, and the visual effect is better. The experimental results based on ship images show that the mAP and recall can reach 89.3% and 93.6%, respectively, which outperforms the representative model (Faster R-CNN, SSD, and YOLOv3). Moreover, our model’s FPS is 45, which can meet real-time detection acquirement well. Hence, the proposed method has the better overall performance and achieves higher detection efficiency and better robustness.


Author(s):  
Kyung-Ae Park ◽  
Jae-Jin Park ◽  
Jae-Cheol Jang ◽  
Ji-Hyun Lee ◽  
Sangwoo Oh ◽  
...  

As human activities of the countries in the East Asia have been remarkably expanding over recent decades, various problems in relation to ships, such as oil spill and many other coastal marine pollution, are continuously occurring in the coastal region. In order to conserve marine resources and prepare for possible ship accidents in advance, the need for efficient ship management is increasing over time. Multi-satellite, multi-sensor, multi-wavelength or multi-frequency observations make it possible to monitor a variety of vessels in the coastal region. This study presents the results of ship detection methodology applied to multi-spectral satellite images in the seas around Korean Peninsula based on optical, hyperspectral, and microwave remote sensing. To detect ships from hyperspectral images with a few hundreds of spectral channels, spectral matching algorithms are used to investigate similarity between the spectra and in-situ measurements. In the case of SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images, the Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) algorithm is used to discriminate the vessels from backscattering coefficients of Sentinel-1 SAR and ALOS-2 PALSAR2 images. The present ship detection methods can be extensively utilized for optical, hyperspectral, and SAR images for comprehensive coastal management purposes toward perpetual sustainability in the future.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (23) ◽  
pp. 8146
Author(s):  
Haozhen Zhu ◽  
Yao Xie ◽  
Huihui Huang ◽  
Chen Jing ◽  
Yingjiao Rong ◽  
...  

With the wide application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a variety of ship detection methods based on CNNs in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images were proposed, but there are still two main challenges: (1) Ship detection requires high real-time performance, and a certain detection speed should be ensured while improving accuracy; (2) The diversity of ships in SAR images requires more powerful multi-scale detectors. To address these issues, a SAR ship detector called Duplicate Bilateral YOLO (DB-YOLO) is proposed in this paper, which is composed of a Feature Extraction Network (FEN), Duplicate Bilateral Feature Pyramid Network (DB-FPN) and Detection Network (DN). Firstly, a single-stage network is used to meet the need of real-time detection, and the cross stage partial (CSP) block is used to reduce the redundant parameters. Secondly, DB-FPN is designed to enhance the fusion of semantic and spatial information. In view of the ships in SAR image are mainly distributed with small-scale targets, the distribution of parameters and computation values between FEN and DB-FPN in different feature layers is redistributed to solve the multi-scale detection. Finally, the bounding boxes and confidence scores are given through the detection head of YOLO. In order to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of DB-YOLO, comparative experiments with the other six state-of-the-art methods (Faster R-CNN, Cascade R-CNN, Libra R-CNN, FCOS, CenterNet and YOLOv5s) on two SAR ship datasets, i.e., SSDD and HRSID, are performed. The experimental results show that the AP50 of DB-YOLO reaches 97.8% on SSDD and 94.4% on HRSID, respectively. DB-YOLO meets the requirement of real-time detection (48.1 FPS) and is superior to other methods in the experiments.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kefeng Ji ◽  
Xiangwei Xing ◽  
Huanxin Zou ◽  
Jixiang Sun

When applying the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector to ship detection on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, multiple interferers such as upwelling, breaking waves, ambiguities, and neighboring ships in a dense traffic area will degrade the probability of detection. In this paper, we propose a novel variable index and excision CFAR (VIE-CFAR) based ship detection method to alleviate the masking effect of multiple interferers. Firstly, we improve the variable index (VI) CFAR with an excision procedure, which censors the multiple interferers from the reference cells. And then, the paper integrates the novel CFAR concept into a ship detection scheme on SAR imagery, which adopts the VIE-CFAR to screen reference cells and the distribution to derive detection threshold. Finally, we analyze the performances of the VIE-CFAR under different environments and validate the proposed method on both ENVISAT and TerraSAR-X SAR data. The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other existing detectors, especially in the presence of multiple interferers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Jimin Yu ◽  
Guangyu Zhou ◽  
Shangbo Zhou ◽  
Maowei Qin

It is very difficult to detect multi-scale synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ships, especially under complex backgrounds. Traditional constant false alarm rate methods are cumbersome in manual design and weak in migration capabilities. Based on deep learning, researchers have introduced methods that have shown good performance in order to get better detection results. However, the majority of these methods have a huge network structure and many parameters which greatly restrict the application and promotion. In this paper, a fast and lightweight detection network, namely FASC-Net, is proposed for multi-scale SAR ship detection under complex backgrounds. The proposed FASC-Net is mainly composed of ASIR-Block, Focus-Block, SPP-Block, and CAPE-Block. Specifically, without losing information, Focus-Block is placed at the forefront of FASC-Net for the first down-sampling of input SAR images at first. Then, ASIR-Block continues to down-sample the feature maps and use a small number of parameters for feature extraction. After that, the receptive field of the feature maps is increased by SPP-Block, and then CAPE-Block is used to perform feature fusion and predict targets of different scales on different feature maps. Based on this, a novel loss function is designed in the present paper in order to train the FASC-Net. The detection performance and generalization ability of FASC-Net have been demonstrated by a series of comparative experiments on the SSDD dataset, SAR-Ship-Dataset, and HRSID dataset, from which it is obvious that FASC-Net has outstanding detection performance on the three datasets and is superior to the existing excellent ship detection methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 1995
Author(s):  
Pan Xu ◽  
Qingyang Li ◽  
Bo Zhang ◽  
Fan Wu ◽  
Ke Zhao ◽  
...  

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites produce large quantities of remote sensing images that are unaffected by weather conditions and, therefore, widely used in marine surveillance. However, because of the hysteresis of satellite-ground communication and the massive quantity of remote sensing images, rapid analysis is not possible and real-time information for emergency situations is restricted. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an on-board ship detection scheme that is based on the traditional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) method and lightweight deep learning. This scheme can be used by the SAR satellite on-board computing platform to achieve near real-time image processing and data transmission. First, we use CFAR to conduct the initial ship detection and then apply the You Only Look Once version 4 (YOLOv4) method to obtain more accurate final results. We built a ground verification system to assess the feasibility of our scheme. With the help of the embedded Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) with high integration, our method achieved 85.9% precision for the experimental data, and the experimental results showed that the processing time was nearly half that required by traditional methods.


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