Summary: | Ship type classification of synthetic aperture radar imagery with convolution neural network (CNN) has been faced with insufficient labeled datasets, unoptimized and noised polarization images that can deteriorate a classification performance. Meanwhile, numerous labeled text information for ships, such as length and breadth, can be easily obtained from various sources and can be utilized in a classification with k-nearest neighbor (KNN). This study proposes a method to improve the efficiency of ship type classification from Sentinel-1 dual-polarization data with 10 m pixel spacing using both CNN and KNN models. In the first stage, Sentinel-1 intensity images centered on ship positions were used in a rectangular shape to apply an image processing procedure such as head-up, padding and image augmentation. The process increased the accuracy by 33.0% and 31.7% for VH (vertical transmit and horizontal receive) and VV (vertical transmit and vertical receive) polarization compared to the CNN-based classification with original ship images, respectively. In the second step, a combined method of CNN and KNN was compared with a CNN-alone case. The f1-score of CNN alone was up to 85.0%, whereas the combination method showed up to 94.3%, which was a 9.3% increase. In the future, more details on an optimization method will be investigated through field experiments of ship classification.
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