A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
ABOships-An Inshore and Offshore Maritime Vessel Detection Dataset with Precise Annotations
Authors: Iancu Bogdan, Soloviev Valentin, Zelioli Luca, Lilius Johan
Publisher: MDPI
Publication year: 2021
Journal: Remote Sensing
Journal name in source: REMOTE SENSING
Journal acronym: REMOTE SENS-BASEL
Article number: ARTN 988
Volume: 13
Issue: 5
Number of pages: 17
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13050988
Web address : https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/5/988
Abstract
Availability of domain-specific datasets is an essential problem in object detection. Datasets of inshore and offshore maritime vessels are no exception, with a limited number of studies addressing maritime vessel detection on such datasets. For that reason, we collected a dataset consisting of images of maritime vessels taking into account different factors: background variation, atmospheric conditions, illumination, visible proportion, occlusion and scale variation. Vessel instances (including nine types of vessels), seamarks and miscellaneous floaters were precisely annotated: we employed a first round of labelling and we subsequently used the CSRT tracker to trace inconsistencies and relabel inadequate label instances. Moreover, we evaluated the out-of-the-box performance of four prevalent object detection algorithms (Faster R-CNN, R-FCN, SSD and EfficientDet). The algorithms were previously trained on the Microsoft COCO dataset. We compared their accuracy based on feature extractor and object size. Our experiments showed that Faster R-CNN with Inception-Resnet v2 outperforms the other algorithms, except in the large object category where EfficientDet surpasses the latter.
Availability of domain-specific datasets is an essential problem in object detection. Datasets of inshore and offshore maritime vessels are no exception, with a limited number of studies addressing maritime vessel detection on such datasets. For that reason, we collected a dataset consisting of images of maritime vessels taking into account different factors: background variation, atmospheric conditions, illumination, visible proportion, occlusion and scale variation. Vessel instances (including nine types of vessels), seamarks and miscellaneous floaters were precisely annotated: we employed a first round of labelling and we subsequently used the CSRT tracker to trace inconsistencies and relabel inadequate label instances. Moreover, we evaluated the out-of-the-box performance of four prevalent object detection algorithms (Faster R-CNN, R-FCN, SSD and EfficientDet). The algorithms were previously trained on the Microsoft COCO dataset. We compared their accuracy based on feature extractor and object size. Our experiments showed that Faster R-CNN with Inception-Resnet v2 outperforms the other algorithms, except in the large object category where EfficientDet surpasses the latter.