Fast Single-shot Ship Instance Segmentation Based on Polar Template Mask in Remote Sensing Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces SSS-Net, a fast, single-shot neural network for ship instance segmentation in remote sensing images, combining efficiency and accuracy through a novel polar template mask approach.

Contribution

The paper presents a new single-shot network architecture with a polar template mask method, improving speed and accuracy in remote sensing ship segmentation tasks.

Findings

SSS-Net achieves high precision in ship segmentation.

SSS-Net operates with high speed suitable for real-time applications.

The method outperforms existing approaches on benchmark datasets.

Abstract

Object detection and instance segmentation in remote sensing images is a fundamental and challenging task, due to the complexity of scenes and targets. The latest methods tried to take into account both the efficiency and the accuracy of instance segmentation. In order to improve both of them, in this paper, we propose a single-shot convolutional neural network structure, which is conceptually simple and straightforward, and meanwhile makes up for the problem of low accuracy of single-shot networks. Our method, termed with SSS-Net, detects targets based on the location of the object's center and the distances between the center and the points on the silhouette sampling with non-uniform angle intervals, thereby achieving abalanced sampling of lines in mask generation. In addition, we propose a non-uniform polar template IoU based on the contour template in polar coordinates. Experiments on both the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge dataset and the ISAIDships dataset show that SSS-Net has strong competitiveness in precision and speed for ship instance segmentation.