China opens world’s largest ship data set that could be used to train drones

A Chinese military research team has released what it described as the first publicly available visible light-infrared ship detection data set, a resource that could sharpen maritime target recognition for drones, missiles or surveillance systems operating at night or in environments where radar is degraded or suppressed.The dual-modal ship detection (DMSD) data set contains more than 2,000 paired visible and infrared vessel images and nearly 20,000 annotated instances, according to the peer-reviewed study published in January by the Chinese-language Journal of Radars.Ship recognition at sea is markedly harder than object detection on land. Maritime environments are shaped by glare, shifting weather, long-range imaging degradation and cluttered backgrounds, all of which can undermine classification accuracy.The challenge was illustrated in February when an Iranian claim of a successful strike on aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln near the Strait of Hormuz was dismissed by Washington, which said the missiles or drones involved did not come close.The episode underscored a familiar problem: reaching the vicinity of a ship is one thing, but reliably detecting, identifying and tracking a moving naval target under contested conditions is another.The dual-modal ship detection (DMSD) data set contains more than 2,000 paired visible and infrared vessel images under different sea conditions and target conditions. Photo: Journal of RadarsThe study was led by researchers from the Naval Aeronautical University in Yantai, Harbin Engineering University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Computing Technology.