OSSDD - a New Open Dataset for Sentinel-1 Ship Detection

2026-08-03

AI Summary

This work addresses the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality public datasets for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection by introducing the Open SAR Ship Detection Dataset (OSSDD), built upon OpenSARShip 1.0. OSSDD comprises 15,197 Sentinel-1 dual-polarization image chips annotated with 55,759 ships, offering—for the first time—triplicate annotations including binary masks, axis-aligned bounding boxes, and rotated bounding boxes. The dataset is publicly released in an open format on the Hugging Face platform. Comprehensive evaluations using state-of-the-art detectors such as Faster R-CNN, FCOS, and DETR establish a new benchmark for SAR ship detection, effectively filling the critical gap in high-quality annotated data and advancing both algorithmic research and maritime surveillance applications.

Abstract

Ship detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images plays an important role for maritime situational awareness, especially with respect to different illegal activities at sea such as illegal fishing, smuggling or border violations. Modern ship detection methods using neural networks usually require large training datasets, which are considerably scarcer in the SAR domain than in the electro-optical domain. While several free datasets exist for this task, their availability and usability vary. In this paper, OpenSARShip-Ship Detection Dataset (OSSDD), a new dataset based on the well-known OpenSARShip 1.0 dataset is proposed for training neural networks for SAR ship detection. OSSDD is freely available and contains 15,197 Sentinel-1 amplitude patches in VV and VH polarization, binary ship masks, axis-aligned bounding box and rotated bounding box annotations for a total of 55,759 ships. The construction of the dataset, the contents and structure of the downloadable data and experiments with three common detector models (Faster R-CNN, FCOS, DETR) are shown and discussed. The results serve as benchmarks for future experiments. The dataset is available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sylviaHoch/OpenSARShip-Ship-Detection-Dataset.

Problem

• SAR ship detection
• training dataset
• maritime situational awareness
• neural networks
• Sentinel-1

Innovation

• SAR ship detection
• open dataset
• Sentinel-1
• rotated bounding box
• maritime surveillance