CPS-Det: An Anchor-Free Based Rotation Detector for Ship Detection

Ship detection is a significant and challenging task in remote sensing. At present, due to the faster speed and higher accuracy, the deep learning method has been widely applied in the field of ship detection. In ship detection, targets usually have the characteristics of arbitrary-oriented property and large aspect ratio. In order to take full advantage of these features to improve speed and accuracy on the base of deep learning methods, this article proposes an anchor-free method, which is referred as CPS-Det, on ship detection using rotatable bounding box. The main improvements of CPS-Det as well as the contributions of this article are as follows. First, an anchor-free based deep learning network was used to improve speed with fewer parameters. Second, an annotation method of oblique rectangular frame is proposed, which solves the problem that periodic angle and bounded coordinates in conjunction with the regression calculation can lead to the problem of loss anomalies. For the annotation scheme proposed in this paper, a scheme for calculating Angle Loss is proposed, which makes the loss function of angle near the boundary value more accurate and greatly improves the accuracy of angle prediction. Third, the centerness calculation of feature points is optimized in this article so that the center weight distribution of each point is suitable for the rotation detection. Finally, a scheme combining centerness and positive sample screening is proposed and its effectiveness in ship detection is proved. Experiments on remote sensing public dataset HRSC2016 show the effectiveness of our approach.