Ship detection in foggy remote sensing image via scene classification R-CNN

The object detection networks via Faster R-CNN for ship detection have demonstrated impressive performance. However, the complexity of weather conditions in high resolution satellite images exposes the limited capacity of these networks. Images interfered by fog are common in optical remote sensing images. In this paper, we embrace this observation and introduce our research. Unlike SAR images, optical sensor images are very susceptible to the effects of the weather, especially clouds and fog. So, accurate target information cannot be obtained from these image, which reduces the accuracy of ship detection. To solve this problem, we attempts to introduce the image defogging methods into object detection networks to suppress the interference of clouds. Secondly, the SC-R-CNN structure is proposed, which uses the scene classification network (SCN) to realize the classification of fog-containing images and cascaded with the object detection network to form a dual-stream object detection framework. In addition, the combination of defogging methods and the SC-R-CNN network also produces more optimized results. We use the remote sensing image data set containing various types of weather conditions to confirm the validity and accuracy of the proposed method.