Aggregate Channel Features and Fast Regions CNN Approach for Classification of Ship and Iceberg

Detection and classification of icebergs and ships in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images play a vital role in marine surveillance systems even though available adaptive threshold methods give satisfying results on detection and classification for ships and icebergs, including techniques of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), but need more accuracy and precision. An efficient and accurate method was developed to detect and classify the ship and icebergs. Hence, the research method proposed locating and classifying both ships and icebergs in a given SAR image with the help of deep learning (DL) and non-DL methods. A non-DL method utilized here was the aggregate channel features (ACF) detector, which extracts region proposals from huge SAR images. The DL object detector called fast regions CNN (FRCNN) detects objects accurately from the result of ACF since the ACF method avoids unwanted regions. The novelty of this study was that ACF-FRCNN concentrates only on accurately classifying ships and icebergs. The proposed ACF-FRCNN method gave a better performance in terms of loss (18.32%), accuracy (96.34%), recall (98.32%), precision (95.97%), and the F1 score (97.13%). Compared to other conventional methods, the combined effect of ACF and FRCNN increased the speed and quality of the detection of ships and icebergs. Thus, the ACF-FRCNN method is considered a novel method for over 75 × 75 resolution ship and iceberg SAR images.