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MS-SSD: multi-scale single shot detector for ship detection in remote sensing images

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Abstract

Object detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Although impressive results have been achieved on large/medium-sized objects, the detection performance of small objects remains a challenging task. Automatic ship detection on remote sensing images is an important module in maritime surveillance system, and it is challenging due to the high variance in appearance and scale. In this work, we thoroughly discuss the issues of SSD on multi-scale objects and propose a multi-scale single-shot detector (MS-SSD) to improve the detection effect of small ship targets and enhance the model’s robustness to scale variance. It enjoys two benefits by introducing (1) more high-level context and (2) more appropriate supervision. Extensive experiments on the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in ship detection from complex backgrounds in remote sensing images. We also achieve better detection performance on the COCO dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, especially for small targets.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.62076059) and the Science Project of Liaoning Province (2021-MS-105).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

    Guangqi Wen, Peng Cao, Haonan Wang & Hanlin Chen

  2. Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing in Medical Image, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

    Guangqi Wen & Peng Cao

  3. Alibaba A.I. Labs, Hangzhou, China

    Xiaoli Liu

  4. Communication and Connected Enterprises Division Research Institute, Neusoft, Foshan, China

    Jinghui Xu

  5. Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

    Osmar Zaiane

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  1. Guangqi Wen
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  2. Peng Cao
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  5. Xiaoli Liu
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Correspondence to Peng Cao.

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Wen, G., Cao, P., Wang, H. et al. MS-SSD: multi-scale single shot detector for ship detection in remote sensing images. Appl Intell 53, 1586–1604 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-022-03549-6

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