GLSD: a global large-scale ship database with baseline evaluations

In this paper, we introduce a challenging Global Large-scale Ship Database (GLSD), designed specifically for ship detection tasks. The designed GLSD database includes a total of 212,357 annotated instances from 152,576 images. Based on the collected images, we propose 13 ship categories that widely exist in international routes. These categories include Sailing boat, Fishing boat, Passenger ship, Warship, General cargo ship, Container ship, Bulk cargo carrier, Barge, Ore carrier, Speed boat, Canoe, Oil carrier, and Tug. The motivations for developing GLSD include the following: 1) providing a refined and extensive ship detection database that benefits the object detection community, 2) establishing a database with exhaustive labels (bounding boxes and ship class categories) in a uniform classification scheme, and 3) providing a large-scale ship database with geographic information (covering more than 3000 ports and 33 routes) that benefits multi-modal analysis. Additionally, we discuss the evaluation protocols corresponding to image characteristics in GLSD and analyze the performance of selected state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on GLSD, aiming to establish baselines for future studies.