Ship Detection from Optical Satellite Images with Deep Learning

Abstract

The effective use and control of maritime routes in the commercial/military area is an increasing and important need for states. There are some motivations for this purpose: Safe traffic of the ships in narrow canals, avoiding illegal usage of anchoring areas of ships, monitoring fishing activities to avoid illegal fishing or protect fish population, detection of lost ships, boats or debris in the ocean, detection and identification of warships (intelligence, defense, offensive, etc.). This paper proposed an open source, fast running ship detection system from optical satellite images with the deep learning algorithm. The system does not need any comprehensive hardware, even can work on an average laptop. Tensorflow Object Detection Application Programming Interface (API)is trained by optical satellite images with ships and used as object detection API.