Ship detection plays an important role in defense and security, port management, environmental monitoring, insurance and risk assessment, and maritime search and rescue operations. While Automated Identification System (AIS) is commonly used for ship detection, it has limitations, such as incomplete ship traffic information due to AIS being switched off or malfunctioning. Also, not all ships are equipped with AIS transponders. Satellite imagery-based detection overcomes these limitations.
The Ship Detection (RGB) pretrained model detects and localizes ships in high-resolution optical satellite images. It can handle both dense and sparse ship patterns. The detected polygons align with the ships' rotation angles to provide more accurate and precise information about the ship's orientation and enhance the spatial representation of ships. The model is based on the MaskRCNN architecture implemented using ArcGIS API for Python and has been trained on an in-house ship detection dataset that covers various ship types and sizes across the United States.
License requirements
To complete this workflow, the following are the license requirements:
- ArcGIS Desktop—ArcGIS Image Analyst extension for ArcGIS Pro
- ArcGIS Enterprise—ArcGIS Image Server
- ArcGIS Online—ArcGIS Pro or Professional Plus user type.
Model details
This model has the following characteristics:
- Input—High resolution, 3-band RGB satellite imagery with spatial resolution of 30-centimeters or 0.3 meters.
- Output— Feature layer with polygons representing the detected ships in the input imagery.
- Compute—This workflow is compute-intensive and a GPU with compute capability of 6.0 or higher is recommended.
- Applicable geographies—The model is expected to work well in the United States and similar geographies.
- Architecture—This model uses the MaskRCNN model architecture implemented in ArcGIS API for Python.
- Accuracy metrics—This model has an average precision score of 0.683.
Training—The model has been trained on an in-house ship detection dataset.
Accessing the model
Download the Ship Detection (RGB) pretrained model from ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. Alternatively, access the model directly from ArcGIS Pro or consume it in ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online.
Download the model (ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World)
Complete the following steps to download the model with ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World:
- Browse to ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.
- Sign in with your ArcGIS Online credentials.
- Search for Ship Detection (RGB) and open the item page from the search results.
- Click the Download button to download the model.You can use the downloaded .dlpk file directly in ArcGIS Pro, or upload and use it in ArcGIS Enterprise. Additionally, you can fine-tune the pretrained model if necessary.
Download the model (ArcGIS Pro)
Complete the following steps to download the model with ArcGIS Pro:
- Open ArcGIS Pro.
- Click the Catalog pane and select Portal.
- Click Living Atlas and search for Ship Detection (RGB).
- Right-click the model and download the .dlpk file.
Release notes
The following are the release notes:
| Date | Description |
|---|---|
| November 2023 | First release of Ship Detection (RGB) |