Small Vessel Detection in Changing Seaborne Environments Using Anchor-Free Detectors on Aerial Images

Pablo Ruiz-Ponce, David Ortiz-Perez, José García Rodríguez

Abstract: We propose an anchor-free object detector to accurately locate small vessels in changing seaborne environments for search and rescue operations using aerial images. Using the YOLOX architecture, we have achieved high accuracy and real-time inference on the SeaDronesSee dataset. In order to face the high imbalance present in the dataset, the variations of the dataset and a weighted loss have been proposed and implemented. Additionally, the proposed method has been tested on unseen images from similar datasets achieving promising results and proving the robustness of the solution.