scholarly journals Precise and Robust Ship Detection for High-Resolution SAR Imagery Based on HR-SDNet

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shunjun Wei ◽  
Hao Su ◽  
Jing Ming ◽  
Chen Wang ◽  
Min Yan ◽  
...  

Ship detection in high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is a challenging problem in the case of complex environments, especially inshore and offshore scenes. Nowadays, the existing methods of SAR ship detection mainly use low-resolution representations obtained by classification networks or recover high-resolution representations from low-resolution representations in SAR images. As the representation learning is characterized by low resolution and the huge loss of resolution makes it difficult to obtain accurate prediction results in spatial accuracy; therefore, these networks are not suitable to ship detection of region-level. In this paper, a novel ship detection method based on a high-resolution ship detection network (HR-SDNet) for high-resolution SAR imagery is proposed. The HR-SDNet adopts a novel high-resolution feature pyramid network (HRFPN) to take full advantage of the feature maps of high-resolution and low-resolution convolutions for SAR image ship detection. In this scheme, the HRFPN connects high-to-low resolution subnetworks in parallel and can maintain high resolution. Next, the Soft Non-Maximum Suppression (Soft-NMS) is used to improve the performance of the NMS, thereby improving the detection performance of the dense ships. Then, we introduce the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) evaluation metrics, which provides not only the higher quality evaluation metrics average precision (AP) for more accurate bounding box regression, but also the evaluation metrics for small, medium and large targets, so as to precisely evaluate the detection performance of our method. Finally, the experimental results on the SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) and TerraSAR-X high-resolution images reveal that (1) our approach based on the HRFPN has superior detection performance for both inshore and offshore scenes of the high-resolution SAR imagery, which achieves nearly 4.3% performance gains compared to feature pyramid network (FPN) in inshore scenes, thus proving its effectiveness; (2) compared with the existing algorithms, our approach is more accurate and robust for ship detection of high-resolution SAR imagery, especially inshore and offshore scenes; (3) with the Soft-NMS algorithm, our network performs better, which achieves nearly 1% performance gains in terms of AP; (4) the COCO evaluation metrics are effective for SAR image ship detection; (5) the displayed thresholds within a certain range have a significant impact on the robustness of ship detectors.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 3650
Author(s):  
Ru Luo ◽  
Jin Xing ◽  
Lifu Chen ◽  
Zhouhao Pan ◽  
Xingmin Cai ◽  
...  

Although deep learning has achieved great success in aircraft detection from SAR imagery, its blackbox behavior has been criticized for low comprehensibility and interpretability. Such challenges have impeded the trustworthiness and wide application of deep learning techniques in SAR image analytics. In this paper, we propose an innovative eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) framework to glassbox deep neural networks (DNN) by using aircraft detection as a case study. This framework is composed of three parts: hybrid global attribution mapping (HGAM) for backbone network selection, path aggregation network (PANet), and class-specific confidence scores mapping (CCSM) for visualization of the detector. HGAM integrates the local and global XAI techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of DNN feature extraction; PANet provides advanced feature fusion to generate multi-scale prediction feature maps; while CCSM relies on visualization methods to examine the detection performance with given DNN and input SAR images. This framework can select the optimal backbone DNN for aircraft detection and map the detection performance for better understanding of the DNN. We verify its effectiveness with experiments using Gaofen-3 imagery. Our XAI framework offers an explainable approach to design, develop, and deploy DNN for SAR image analytics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 328
Author(s):  
Wenkai Liang ◽  
Yan Wu ◽  
Ming Li ◽  
Yice Cao ◽  
Xin Hu

The classification of high-resolution (HR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is of great importance for SAR scene interpretation and application. However, the presence of intricate spatial structural patterns and complex statistical nature makes SAR image classification a challenging task, especially in the case of limited labeled SAR data. This paper proposes a novel HR SAR image classification method, using a multi-scale deep feature fusion network and covariance pooling manifold network (MFFN-CPMN). MFFN-CPMN combines the advantages of local spatial features and global statistical properties and considers the multi-feature information fusion of SAR images in representation learning. First, we propose a Gabor-filtering-based multi-scale feature fusion network (MFFN) to capture the spatial pattern and get the discriminative features of SAR images. The MFFN belongs to a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). To make full use of a large amount of unlabeled data, the weights of each layer of MFFN are optimized by unsupervised denoising dual-sparse encoder. Moreover, the feature fusion strategy in MFFN can effectively exploit the complementary information between different levels and different scales. Second, we utilize a covariance pooling manifold network to extract further the global second-order statistics of SAR images over the fusional feature maps. Finally, the obtained covariance descriptor is more distinct for various land covers. Experimental results on four HR SAR images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and achieve promising results over other related algorithms.


Author(s):  
Shitian He ◽  
Huanxin Zou ◽  
Yingqian Wang ◽  
Runlin Li ◽  
Fei Cheng ◽  
...  

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 3341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilal Tayara ◽  
Kil Chong

Object detection in very high-resolution (VHR) aerial images is an essential step for a wide range of applications such as military applications, urban planning, and environmental management. Still, it is a challenging task due to the different scales and appearances of the objects. On the other hand, object detection task in VHR aerial images has improved remarkably in recent years due to the achieved advances in convolution neural networks (CNN). Most of the proposed methods depend on a two-stage approach, namely: a region proposal stage and a classification stage such as Faster R-CNN. Even though two-stage approaches outperform the traditional methods, their optimization is not easy and they are not suitable for real-time applications. In this paper, a uniform one-stage model for object detection in VHR aerial images has been proposed. In order to tackle the challenge of different scales, a densely connected feature pyramid network has been proposed by which high-level multi-scale semantic feature maps with high-quality information are prepared for object detection. This work has been evaluated on two publicly available datasets and outperformed the current state-of-the-art results on both in terms of mean average precision (mAP) and computation time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuanyuan Wang ◽  
Chao Wang ◽  
Hong Zhang ◽  
Yingbo Dong ◽  
Sisi Wei

Independent of daylight and weather conditions, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is widely applied to detect ships in marine surveillance. The shapes of ships are multi-scale in SAR imagery due to multi-resolution imaging modes and their various shapes. Conventional ship detection methods are highly dependent on the statistical models of sea clutter or the extracted features, and their robustness need to be strengthened. Being an automatic learning representation, the RetinaNet object detector, one kind of deep learning model, is proposed to crack this obstacle. Firstly, feature pyramid networks (FPN) are used to extract multi-scale features for both ship classification and location. Then, focal loss is used to address the class imbalance and to increase the importance of the hard examples during training. There are 86 scenes of Chinese Gaofen-3 Imagery at four resolutions, i.e., 3 m, 5 m, 8 m, and 10 m, used to evaluate our approach. Two Gaofen-3 images and one Constellation of Small Satellite for Mediterranean basin Observation (Cosmo-SkyMed) image are used to evaluate the robustness. The experimental results reveal that (1) RetinaNet not only can efficiently detect multi-scale ships but also has a high detection accuracy; (2) compared with other object detectors, RetinaNet achieves more than a 96% mean average precision (mAP). These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.


Author(s):  
Ruochen Wu

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an active type of microwave remote sensing. Using the microwave imaging system, remote sensing monitoring of the land and global ocean can be done in any weather conditions around the clock. Detection of SAR image targets is one of the main needs of radar image interpretation applications. In this paper, an improved two-parameter CFAR algorithm based on Rayleigh distribution and morphological processing is proposed to perform ship detection and recognition in high resolution SAR images. Through simulation experiments, comprehensive study of the two algorithms for high resolution SAR image target detection is achieved. Finally, the results of ship detection experiments are compared and analyzed, and the effects of detection are evaluated according to the Rayleigh distribution model and algorithms.


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