Oriented Ship Detection Based on Intersecting Circle and Deformable RoI in Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Ship detection is an important topic in the task of understanding remote sensing images. One of the challenges for ship detection is the large length–width ratio of ships, which may weaken the feature extraction ability. Simultaneously, ships inclining in any direction is also a challenge for ship detection in remote sensing images. In this paper, a novel Oriented Ship detection method is proposed based on an intersecting Circle and Deformable region of interest (OSCD-Net), which aims at describing the characteristics of a large length–width ratio and arbitrary direction. OSCD-Net is composed of two modules: an intersecting circle rotated detection head (ICR-head) and a deformable region of interest (DRoI). The ICR-head detects a horizontal bounding box and an intersecting circle to obtain an oriented bounding box. DRoI performs three RoIAlign with different pooled sizes for each feature candidate region. In addition, the DRoI module uses transformation and deformation operations to pay attention to ship feature information and align feature shapes. OSCD-Net shows promising performance on public remote sensing image datasets.

Keywords

• deep learning
• object detection
• oriented bounding box
• ship detection
• remote sensing image