Domain adaptive ship detection in optical remote sensing images

With the successful application of the convolutional neural network (CNN), significant progress has been made by CNN-based ship detection methods. However, they often face considerable difficulties when applied to a new domain where the imaging condition changes significantly. Although training with the two domains together can solve this problem to some extent, the large domain shift will lead to sub-optimal feature representations, and thus weaken the generalization ability on both domains. In this paper, a domain adaptive ship detection method is proposed to better detect ships between different domains. Specifically, the proposed method minimizes the domain discrepancies via both image-level adaption and instance-level adaption. In image-level adaption, we use multiple receptive field integration and channel domain attention to enhance the feature’s resistance to scale and environmental changes, respectively. Moreover, a novel boundary regression module is proposed in instance-level adaption to correct the localization deviation of the ship proposals caused by the domain shift. Compared with conventional regression approaches, the proposed boundary regression module is able to make more accurate predictions via the effective extreme point features. The two adaption components are implemented by learning the corresponding domain classifiers respectively in an adversarial training way, thereby obtaining a robust model suitable for both of the two domains. Experiments on both supervised and unsupervised domain adaption scenarios are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.