Fine-Grained Ship Recognition from the Horizontal View Based on Domain Adaptation

Ship recognition is a fundamental and essential step in maritime activities, and it can be widely used in maritime rescue, vessel management, and other applications. However, most studies conducted in this area use synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and space-borne optical images, and those studies utilizing visible images are limited to the coarse-grained level. In this study, we constructed a fine-grained ship dataset with real images and simulation images that consisted of five categories of ships. To solve the problem of low accuracy in fine-grained ship classification with different angles in visible images, a network based on domain adaptation and a transformer was proposed. Concretely, style transfer was first used to reduce the gap between the simulation images and real images. Then, with the goal of utilizing the simulation images to execute classification tasks on the real images, a domain adaptation network based on local maximum mean discrepancy (LMMD) was used to align the different domain distributions. Furthermore, considering the innate attention mechanism of the transformer, a vision transformer (ViT) was chosen as the feature extraction module to extract the fine-grained features, and a fully connected layer was used as the classifier. Finally, the experimental results showed that our network had good performance on the fine-grained ship dataset with an overall accuracy rate of 96.0%, and the mean average precision (mAP) of detecting first and then classifying with our network was 87.5%, which also verified the feasibility of using images generated by computer simulation technology for auxiliary training.