Finding Arbitrary-Oriented Ships from Remote Sensing Images Using Corner Detection

Ship detection in remote sensing images is a challenging task. In this letter, a novel anchor-free framework is proposed for detecting arbitrary-oriented ships in remote sensing images. First, an end-to-end fully convolutional network is designed to detect the three key points, including the bow, stern, and center of the ship, as well as its angle. Second, the key points of the bow and stern are combined to generate possible rotated bounding boxes. Third, the predicted center and angle information of the ship are used to confirm the bounding box. In the designed network, feature fusion and feature enhancement modules are introduced to improve the performance in complex scenes. The proposed method avoids complicated anchor design compared with anchor-based methods. The experimental results show that with good robustness to haze occlusion, scale variation, and adjacent ship disturbances, our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.