Ship detection in spaceborne infrared images based on Convolutional Neural Networks and synthetic targets

Abstract Automatic detection of ships in spaceborne infrared images is important for both military and civil applications due to its all-weather detection capability. While deep learning methods have made great success in many image processing fields recently, training deep learning models still relies on large amount of labeled data, which may limit its application performance for infrared images target detection tasks. Considering that, we propose a new infrared ship detection method based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) which is trained only with synthetic targets. For the problem of limited infrared training data, we design a Transfer Network (T-Net) to generate large amount of synthetic infrared-style ship targets from Google Earth images. The experiments are conducted on a near infrared band image ( 0.845 – 0.885 μ m ), a short wavelength infrared band image ( 1.560 – 1.66 μ m ) and a long wavelength infrared band image ( 2.1 – 2.3 μ m ) of Landsat-8 satellite. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the target generation ability of T-Net. With only synthetic training samples, our detection method achieves a higher accuracy than other classical ship detection methods.