SimuShips -- A High Resolution Simulation Dataset for Ship Detection with Precise Annotations

TL;DR

SimuShips is a comprehensive high-resolution simulation dataset for maritime obstacle detection, designed to enhance CNN training and improve detection accuracy in autonomous ships.

Contribution

This work introduces SimuShips, a large-scale, annotated simulation dataset for maritime obstacle detection, addressing data scarcity in autonomous maritime surface vessel applications.

Findings

Combining real and simulated data increases recall by 2.9%

SimuShips covers diverse obstacle types and conditions

Simulation data proves viable for training CNNs like YOLOv5

Abstract

Obstacle detection is a fundamental capability of an autonomous maritime surface vessel (AMSV). State-of-the-art obstacle detection algorithms are based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). While CNNs provide higher detection accuracy and fast detection speed, they require enormous amounts of data for their training. In particular, the availability of domain-specific datasets is a challenge for obstacle detection. The difficulty in conducting onsite experiments limits the collection of maritime datasets. Owing to the logistic cost of conducting on-site operations, simulation tools provide a safe and cost-efficient alternative for data collection. In this work, we introduce SimuShips, a publicly available simulation-based dataset for maritime environments. Our dataset consists of 9471 high-resolution (1920x1080) images which include a wide range of obstacle types, atmospheric and illumination conditions along with occlusion, scale and visible proportion variations. We provide annotations in the form of bounding boxes. In addition, we conduct experiments with YOLOv5 to test the viability of simulation data. Our experiments indicate that the combination of real and simulated images improves the recall for all classes by 2.9%.