OSSDD - a New Open Dataset for Sentinel-1 Ship Detection
2026-08-03 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created a new dataset called OpenSARShip-Ship Detection Dataset (OSSDD) to help computers learn to find ships in radar images taken from satellites. These radar images, called Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), are useful for spotting illegal activities at sea but are hard to analyze because there aren’t many training examples available. Their dataset includes over 15,000 image patches with detailed labels for more than 55,000 ships, which can be used to train and test different ship detection methods. They also tested three common computer models on the dataset to provide baseline results for other researchers to compare against.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)Ship detectionNeural networksTraining datasetSentinel-1Bounding boxShip masksFaster R-CNNFCOSDETR
Authors
Horst Hammer, Sylvia Hochstuhl, Antje Thiele, Tobias Brosch, Padraig Davidson, Tim Remiger, Michael Teutsch
Abstract
Ship detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images plays an important role for maritime situational awareness, especially with respect to different illegal activities at sea such as illegal fishing, smuggling or border violations. Modern ship detection methods using neural networks usually require large training datasets, which are considerably scarcer in the SAR domain than in the electro-optical domain. While several free datasets exist for this task, their availability and usability vary. In this paper, OpenSARShip-Ship Detection Dataset (OSSDD), a new dataset based on the well-known OpenSARShip 1.0 dataset is proposed for training neural networks for SAR ship detection. OSSDD is freely available and contains 15,197 Sentinel-1 amplitude patches in VV and VH polarization, binary ship masks, axis-aligned bounding box and rotated bounding box annotations for a total of 55,759 ships. The construction of the dataset, the contents and structure of the downloadable data and experiments with three common detector models (Faster R-CNN, FCOS, DETR) are shown and discussed. The results serve as benchmarks for future experiments. The dataset is available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sylviaHoch/OpenSARShip-Ship-Detection-Dataset.