SISP: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Ship Instance Segmentation in Panchromatic Satellite Images
This addresses the need for better maritime monitoring by providing a more realistic dataset, though it is incremental as it builds on existing instance segmentation tasks.
The authors tackled the problem of fine-grained ship instance segmentation in satellite images by introducing the SISP dataset with 56,693 annotated instances across 10,000 images, and they proposed the DFRInst method to improve segmentation performance.
Fine-grained ship instance segmentation in satellite images holds considerable significance for monitoring maritime activities at sea. However, existing datasets often suffer from the scarcity of fine-grained information or pixel-wise localization annotations, as well as the insufficient image diversity and variations, thus limiting the research of this task. To this end, we propose a benchmark dataset for fine-grained Ship Instance Segmentation in Panchromatic satellite images, namely SISP, which contains 56,693 well-annotated ship instances with four fine-grained categories across 10,000 sliced images, and all the images are collected from SuperView-1 satellite with the resolution of 0.5m. Targets in the proposed SISP dataset have characteristics that are consistent with real satellite scenes, such as high class imbalance, various scenes, large variations in target densities and scales, and high inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity, all of which make the SISP dataset more suitable for real-world applications. In addition, we introduce a Dynamic Feature Refinement-assist Instance segmentation network, namely DFRInst, as the benchmark method for ship instance segmentation in satellite images, which can fortify the explicit representation of crucial features, thus improving the performance of ship instance segmentation. Experiments and analysis are performed on the proposed SISP dataset to evaluate the benchmark method and several state-of-the-art methods to establish baselines for facilitating future research. The proposed dataset and source codes will be available at: https://github.com/Justlovesmile/SISP.