With the launch of space-borne satellites, more synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are available than ever before, thus making dynamic ship monitoring possible. Object detectors in deep learning achieve top performance, benefitting from a free public dataset. Unfortunately, due to the lack of a large volume of labeled datasets, object detectors for SAR ship detection have developed slowly. To boost the development of object detectors in SAR images, a SAR dataset is constructed. This dataset labeled by SAR experts was created using 102 Chinese Gaofen-3 images and 108 Sentinel-1 images. It consists of 43,819 ship chips of 256 pixels in both range and azimuth. These ships mainly have distinct scales and backgrounds. Moreover, modified state-of-the-art object detectors from natural images are trained and can be used as baselines. Experimental results reveal that object detectors achieve higher mean average precision (mAP) on the test dataset and have high generalization performance on new SAR imagery without land-ocean segmentation, demonstrating the benefits of the dataset we constructed.

Independent of daylight and weather conditions, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is widely applied to detect ships in marine surveillance. The shapes of ships are multi-scale in SAR imagery due to multi-resolution imaging modes and their various shapes. Conventional ship detection methods are highly dependent on the statistical models of sea clutter or the extracted features, and their robustness need to be strengthened. Being an automatic learning representation, the RetinaNet object detector, one kind of deep learning model, is proposed to crack this obstacle. Firstly, feature pyramid networks (FPN) are used to extract multi-scale features for both ship classification and location. Then, focal loss is used to address the class imbalance and to increase the importance of the hard examples during training. There are 86 scenes of Chinese Gaofen-3 Imagery at four resolutions, i.e., 3 m, 5 m, 8 m, and 10 m, used to evaluate our approach. Two Gaofen-3 images and one Constellation of Small Satellite for Mediterranean basin Observation (Cosmo-SkyMed) image are used to evaluate the robustness. The experimental results reveal that (1) RetinaNet not only can efficiently detect multi-scale ships but also has a high detection accuracy; (2) compared with other object detectors, RetinaNet achieves more than a 96% mean average precision (mAP). These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Due to the unique advantages of microwave detection, such as its low restriction from the atmosphere and its capability to obtain structural information about ground targets, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is increasingly used in agricultural observations. However, while SAR data has shown great potential for large-scale crop mapping, there have been few studies on the use of SAR images for large-scale multispecies crop classification at present. In this paper, a large-scale crop mapping method using multi-temporal dual-polarization SAR data was proposed. To reduce multi-temporal SAR data redundancy, a multi-temporal images optimization method based on analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Jeffries–Matusita (J–M) distance was applied to the time series of images after preprocessing to select the optimal images. Facing the challenges from smallholder farming modes, which caused the complex crop planting patterns in the study area, U-Net, an improved fully convolutional network (FCN), was used to predict the different crop types. In addition, the batch normalization (BN) algorithm was introduced to the U-Net model to solve the problem of a large number of crops and unbalanced sample numbers, which had greatly improved the efficiency of network training. Finally, we conducted experiments using multi-temporal Sentinel-1 data from Fuyu City, Jilin Province, China in 2017, and we obtained crop mapping results with an overall accuracy of 85% as well as a Kappa coefficient of 0.82. Compared with the traditional machine learning methods (e.g., random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM)), the proposed method can still achieve better classification performance under the condition of a complex crop planting structure.

With the capability to automatically learn discriminative features, deep learning has experienced great success in natural images but has rarely been explored for ship classification in high-resolution SAR images due to the training bottleneck caused by the small datasets. In this paper, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are applied to ship classification by using SAR images with the small datasets. First, ship chips are constructed from high-resolution SAR images and split into training and validation datasets. Second, a ship classification model is constructed based on very deep convolutional networks (VGG). Then, VGG is pretrained via ImageNet, and fine tuning is utilized to train our model. Six scenes of COSMO-SkyMed images are used to evaluate our proposed model with regard to the classification accuracy. The experimental results reveal that (1) our proposed ship classification model trained by fine tuning achieves more than 95% average classification accuracy, even with 5-cross validation; (2) compared with other models, the ship classification model based on VGG16 achieves at least 2% higher accuracies for classification. These experimental results reveal the effectiveness of our proposed method.