Vessel Detection with SDGSAT-1 Nighttime Light Images

The Sustainable Development Goals Science Satellite-1 (SDGSAT-1) Glimmer Imager for Urbanization (GIU) data is very sensitive to low radiation and capable of detecting weak light sources from vessels at night while significantly improving the spatial resolution compared to similar products. Most existing methods fail to use the relevant characteristics of vessels effectively, and it is difficult to deal with the complex shape of vessels in high-resolution Nighttime Light (NTL) data, resulting in unsatisfactory detection results. Considering the overall sparse distribution of vessels and the light source diffusion phenomenon, a novel vessel detection method is proposed in this paper, utilizing the high spatial resolution of the SDGSAT-1. More specifically, noise separation is completed based on a local contrast-weighted RPCA. Then, artificial light sources are detected based on a density clustering algorithm, and an inter-cluster merging method is utilized to realize vessel detection further. We selected three research areas, namely, the Bohai Sea, the East China Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, to establish a vessel dataset and applied the algorithm to the dataset. The results show that the total detection accuracy and the recall rate of the detection algorithm in our dataset are 96.84% and 96.67%, which is significantly better performance than other methods used for comparison in the experiment. The algorithm overcomes the dataset’s complex target shapes and noise conditions and achieves good results, which proves the applicability of the algorithm.