Ship Classification and Identification from Satellites

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Abstract
Ships may be found by different types of satellite sensors including Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR), multispectral, Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) and RF electronic support systems. Several methods are described for detecting, classifying, and identify (ID) ships as well as discriminating them from, e.g., icebergs. For example, AIS data can be used in combination with other sensors both for annotation and for finding dark ships, i.e., ships that have turned off their transponder. The sensor fusion, data combination and matching of various sensor data spatially and temporally are then important. We analyze methods and results for various combinations of sensor data, where we use deep neural networks on annotated datasets for detection, classification, discrimination and ID of ships.