STships: An Object Detection Dataset Based on Real Seascapes

This paper introduces a dataset (called STships) based on real seascapes for ship detection. The dataset was collected with a HD dome camera in Sanya on July 18 and July 20, 2022. 7483 images are covered in the dataset belonging to 6 types of targets (research vessel, oil tanker, general cargo ship, fishing boat, passenger ship and ocean buoy). 7109 images are carefully annotated, in addition to 374 background images. A number of practical influencing factors were taken into account during the construction of the dataset, including: background, visible proportion, scale, illumination. Baseline detector is trained on the dataset to evaluate the performance. And there is also a comparison between STships and other dataset. The dataset is expected to advance ship detection and application under real seascapes