FAD-SAR: A Novel Fishing Activity Detection System via Synthetic Aperture Radar Images Based on Deep Learning Method

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities seriously affect various aspects of human life. However, traditional methods for detecting and monitoring IUU fishing activities at sea have limitations. Although synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can complement existing vessel detection systems, extracting useful information from SAR images using traditional methods remains a challenge, especially in IUU fishing. This paper proposes a deep learning based fishing activity detection system, which is implemented on the xView3 dataset using six classical object detection models: SSD, RetinaNet, FSAF, FCOS, Faster R-CNN, and Cascade R-CNN. In addition, this work employs different enhancement techniques to improve the performance of the Faster R-CNN model. The experimental results demonstrate that training the Faster R-CNN model using the Online Hard Example Mining (OHEM) strategy increases the Avg-F1 value from 0.212 to 0.216.