Multi-Resolution Ship Association in Satellite Imagery:Integrating High-Resolution Detection with Template Matching

Ship association in satellite imagery is important for maritime surveillance, but existing methods are generally limited to images with similar resolutions. This paper proposes a multi-resolution ship association framework that combines high-resolution object detection with low-resolution template matching. In the high-resolution stage, ship targets are detected and their positions and patches are recorded. In the low-resolution stage, the detected positions are used to define candidate search regions, within which template matching is performed to locate the corresponding ships. Experiments on three satellite scenes with different spatial resolutions show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the baseline methods. The association accuracy, defined as the proportion of correctly associated ship pairs, reaches 0.933, 0.870 and 0.862. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for multi-resolution ship association in the tested GF-1 scenes and its potential for practical maritime monitoring.