Integrated Localization and Recognition for Inshore Ships in Large Scene Remote Sensing Images

Automatic inshore ship recognition, which includes target localization and type recognition, is an important and challenging task. However, existing ship recognition methods mainly focus on the classification of ship samples or clips. These methods rely deeply on the detection algorithm to complete localization and recognition in large scene images. In this letter, we present an integrated framework to automatically locate and recognize inshore ships in large scene satellite images. Different from traditional object recognition methods using two steps of detection-classification, the proposed framework could locate inshore ships and identify types without the detection step. Considering ship size is a useful feature, a novel multimodel method is proposed to utilize this feature. And an Euclidean-distance-based fusion strategy is used to combine candidates given by models. This fusion strategy could effectively separate side-by-side ships. To handle large scene images efficiently, scale-invariant feature transform registration is also integrated into the framework to utilize geographic information. All of these make the framework an end-to-end fashion which could automatically recognize inshore ships in large scene satellite images. Experiments on Quickbird images show that this framework could achieve the actual applied requirements.