Task: Maritime object detection and classification in global SAR scenes

Task: Maritime object detection and classification in global SAR scenes

Rapid detection of IUU fishing activity will enable interdiction and prosecution of offenders, mitigating the damages from IUU fishing. The rise of SAR satellite imagery offers an all-weather, day-and-night source to detect vessels that may otherwise elude fishing enforcement authorities.

We have constructed a large, multi-dimensional dataset of SAR satellite views and contextual data that are relevant for the tasks of maritime object detection and classification. Each xView3 data object represents a historical SAR satellite scene which has been preprocessed, co-registered, reprojected to Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates, and used to match historical detections derived from AIS, VMS, automated, and manual (human) visual detections. For the xView3 Challenge, the prediction task is:

• Identify the maritime objects in each scene
• For each object, estimate its length, and classify it as vessel or non-vessel
• For each vessel, classify it as fishing or non-fishing