Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) represents a powerful source of data for enhancing maritime domain awareness (MDA). Wakes generated by traveling vessels hold a crucial role in MDA since they can be exploited both for ship route and velocity estimation and as a marker of ship presence. Even if deep learning (DL) has led to an impressive performance boost on a variety of computer vision tasks, its usage for automatic target recognition (ATR) in SAR images to support MDA is still limited to the detection of ships rather than ship wakes. A dataset is presented in this paper and several state-of-the-art object detectors based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are tested with different backbones. The dataset, including more than 250 wake chips, is realized by visually inspecting Sentinel-1 images over highly trafficked maritime sites. Extensive experiments are shown to characterize CNNs for the wake detection task. For the first time, a deep-learning approach is implemented to specifically detect ship wakes without any a-priori knowledge or cuing about the location of the vessel that generated the wake. No annotated dataset was available to train deep-learning detectors on this task, which is instead presented in this paper. Moreover, the benchmarks achieved for different detectors point out promising features and weak points of the relevant approaches. Thus, the work also aims at stimulating more research in this promising, but still under-investigated, field.

First results on wake detection in sar images by deep learning / Del Prete, R.; Graziano, M. D.; Renga, A.. - In: REMOTE SENSING. - ISSN 2072-4292. - 13:22(2021). [10.3390/rs13224573]

First results on wake detection in sar images by deep learning

Del Prete R.;Graziano M. D.;Renga A.
2021

Abstract

Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) represents a powerful source of data for enhancing maritime domain awareness (MDA). Wakes generated by traveling vessels hold a crucial role in MDA since they can be exploited both for ship route and velocity estimation and as a marker of ship presence. Even if deep learning (DL) has led to an impressive performance boost on a variety of computer vision tasks, its usage for automatic target recognition (ATR) in SAR images to support MDA is still limited to the detection of ships rather than ship wakes. A dataset is presented in this paper and several state-of-the-art object detectors based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are tested with different backbones. The dataset, including more than 250 wake chips, is realized by visually inspecting Sentinel-1 images over highly trafficked maritime sites. Extensive experiments are shown to characterize CNNs for the wake detection task. For the first time, a deep-learning approach is implemented to specifically detect ship wakes without any a-priori knowledge or cuing about the location of the vessel that generated the wake. No annotated dataset was available to train deep-learning detectors on this task, which is instead presented in this paper. Moreover, the benchmarks achieved for different detectors point out promising features and weak points of the relevant approaches. Thus, the work also aims at stimulating more research in this promising, but still under-investigated, field.
2021
First results on wake detection in sar images by deep learning / Del Prete, R.; Graziano, M. D.; Renga, A.. - In: REMOTE SENSING. - ISSN 2072-4292. - 13:22(2021). [10.3390/rs13224573]
File in questo prodotto:
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11588/865897
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 21
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 15
social impact