xView3-SAR: Detecting Dark Fishing Activity Using Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery

Fernando Paolo, Tsu-ting Tim Lin, Ritwik Gupta, Bryce Goodman, Nirav Patel, Daniel Kuster, David Kroodsma, Jared Dunnmon

Keywords: dataset, synthetic aperture radar, remote sensing, dark vessel, object detection, illegal fishing, social good

TL;DR: A large dataset of >80M sq. km. of synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery with >220k instances of dark vessels for illegal fishing prevention.

Abstract: Unsustainable fishing practices worldwide pose a major threat to marine resources and ecosystems. Identifying vessels that do not show up in conventional monitoring systems---known as ``dark vessels''---is key to managing and securing the health of marine environments. With the rise of satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and modern machine learning (ML), it is now possible to automate detection of dark vessels day or night, under all-weather conditions. SAR images, however, require a domain-specific treatment and are not widely accessible to the ML community. Maritime objects (vessels and offshore infrastructure) are relatively small and sparse, challenging traditional computer vision approaches. We present the largest labeled dataset for training ML models to detect and characterize vessels and ocean structures in SAR imagery. xView3-SAR consists of nearly 1,000 analysis-ready SAR images from the Sentinel-1 mission that are, on average, 29,400-by-24,400 pixels each. The images are annotated using a combination of automated and manual analysis. Co-located bathymetry and wind state rasters accompany every SAR image. We also provide an overview of the xView3 Computer Vision Challenge, an international competition using xView3-SAR for ship detection and characterization at large scale. We release the data (\href{https://iuu.xview.us/}{https://iuu.xview.us/}) and code (\href{https://github.com/DIUx-xView}{https://github.com/DIUx-xView}) to support ongoing development and evaluation of ML approaches for this important application.

URL: https://iuu.xview.us/

Open Credentialized Access: Sign up for an account at https://iuu.xview.us/. This process is instantaneous. US laws require that data released by organizations is released in a controlled manner to avoid distribution to individuals and organizations in countries on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

Dataset Url: https://iuu.xview.us/

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Author Statement: Yes

Contribution Process Agreement: Yes

In Person Attendance: Yes

Community Implementations: [ 3 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/xview3-sar-detecting-dark-fishing-activity/code)