Ship classification and detection based on CNN using GF-3 SAR images

Ocean surveillance via high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imageries has been a hot issue because SAR is able to work in all-day and all-weather conditions. The launch of Chinese Gaofen-3 (GF-3) satellite has provided a large number of SAR imageries, making it possible to marine targets monitoring. However, it is difficult for traditional methods to extract effective features to classify and detect different types of marine targets in SAR images. This paper proposes a convolutional neutral network (CNN) model for marine target classification at patch level and an overall scheme for marine target detection in large-scale SAR images. First, eight types of marine targets in GF-3 SAR images are labelled based on feature analysis, building the datasets for further experiments. As for the classification task at patch level, a novel CNN model with six convolutional layers, three pooling layers, and two fully connected layers has been designed. With respect to the detection part, a Single Shot Multi-box Detector with a multi-resolution input (MR-SSD) is developed, which can extract more features at different resolution versions. In order to detect different targets in large-scale SAR images, a whole workflow including sea-land segmentation, cropping with overlapping, detection with MR-SSD model, coordinates mapping, and predicted boxes consolidation is developed. Experiments based on the GF-3 dataset demonstrate the merits of the proposed methods for marine target classification and detection.