Ship Detection and Statistics in Constanta Anchorage Using Sentinel-1 Data

Monitoring the ships in the Black Sea is of strategic importance. In this paper, we use synthetic aperture radar data provided by the Sentinel-1 satellite to detect the ships in the Constanta anchorage, Romania. The analysis of the data is based on object detection performed using the YOLOv5m model pre-trained on the COCO dataset, further fine-tuned on the HRSID SAR dataset. We propose the usage of a simple yet effective approach called constant false alarm rate for ship detection in order to detect ships in the region of interest. After the detection step, we perform statistics regarding the ships present in the Constanta anchorage in the Sentinel-1 data available for the year 2024. We show experimental results and draw the conclusions.