MTU-Net: Multilevel TransUNet for Space-Based Infrared Tiny Ship Detection

Space-based infrared tiny ship detection aims at separating tiny ships from the images captured by Earth-orbiting satellites. Due to the extremely large image coverage area (e.g., thousands of square kilometers), candidate targets in these images are much smaller, dimer, and more changeable than those targets observed by aerial- and land-based imaging devices. Existing short imaging distance-based infrared datasets and target detection methods cannot be well adopted to the space-based surveillance task. To address these problems, we develop a space-based infrared tiny ship detection dataset (namely, NUDT-SIRST-Sea) with 48 space-based infrared images and $17\,598$ pixel-level tiny ship annotations. Each…

• NN
  National Natural Science Foundation of China

  Awards: 62001478, 61401474, 61921001, 2021YFB3100800, 61972435
• NK
  National Key Research and Development Program of China

  Award: 2021YFB3100800