An Improved Faster R-CNN Based on MSER Decision Criterion for SAR Image Ship Detection in Harbor

SAR ship detection is essential for marine monitoring. Due to the high similarity between the harbor and the ship body on gray and texture features, the traditional methods are unable to achieve effective inshore ship detection. An improved Faster R-CNN based on MSER decision criterion for SAR ship detection in harbor is proposed in this paper. It is a ship detection method based on the combination of feature-based method and pixel-based method. Firstly, Faster R-CNN is used to generate region proposals. Then, replace the threshold decision criterion of Faster R-CNN with the maximum stability extremal region (MSER) method to reassess the generated region proposals with higher scores, aiming at improving the detection rate and reducing the false alarm rate simultaneously. Experimental results based on satellite-borne SAR data illustrate that the proposed method obtains excellent detection performance and low false alarm rate.