A public dataset for ship classification in remote sensing images

Ship classification in remote sensing images has been rarely studied because of relative scarcity of publicly available datasets. It is well known that datasets have played an important role in object classification research, especially for CNN-based algorithms which have been proved to perform well. In this paper, we introduce a public Dataset for Ship Classification in Remote sensing images (DSCR). We collect 1,951 remote sensing images from DOTA, HRSC2016, NWPU VHR-10 and Google Earth, containing warships and civilian ships of various scales. For object classification, we cut out ships of different categories from the collected images. The whole dataset contains about 20,675 instances which are divided into seven categories, i.e. aircraft carrier, destroyer, assault ship, combat ship, cruiser, other military ship and civilian ship. Each image contains ships of the same category, which is labeled by the category name. Since our dataset contains most models of major warships, it is relatively comprehensive for ship classification. To build a benchmark for ship classification, we evaluated six popular CNN-based object classification algorithms on our dataset, including ResNet, ResNext, VGG, GoogLeNet, DenseNet, and AlexNet. Experiments demonstrates that our dataset can be used for verifying ship classification algorithms and may advance the development of ship classification in remote sensing images.