An Efficient Ship Detection Method Based on YOLO and Ship Wakes Using High-Resolution Optical Jilin1 Satellite Imagery

In this study, we propose a practical and efficient scheme for ship detection in remote sensing imagery. Our method is developed using both ship body detection and ship wake detection and combines deep learning and feature-based image processing. A deep convolutional neural network is used to achieve ship body detection, and a feature-based processing method is proposed to detect ship wakes. For better analysis, we model the sea region and evaluate the quality of the image. Generally, the wake detection result is used to assist ship detection and obtain the sailing direction. Conventional methods cannot detect ships that are covered by clouds or outside the image boundary. The method proposed in this paper uses the wake to detect such ships, with a certain level of confidence and low false alarm probability in detection. Practical aspects such as the method's applicability and time efficiency are considered in our method for real applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in a real remote sensing dataset. The results show that over 93.5% of ships and over 70% of targets with no visible ship body can be successfully detected. This illustrates that the proposed detection framework can fill the gap regarding the detection of sailing ships in a remote sensing image.