Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models for Ship Classification from Satellite Images

Abstract

The automatic detection of the ship from satellite image analysis is the limelight of research in recent years due to its widespread applications. In this paper, a handful of traditional machine learning and deep learning models are compared based on their performance to classify the satellite images available in the public repository as a ship or other categories. The Support Vector Machine(SVM), Decision Trees, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Gaussian Naive Bayes (GaussianNB), and Logistic Regression are machine learning models used in the present work. Histogram of Gradient (HoG) features are used as feature descriptors considering the diverse size and shape of ships in the satellite image dataset. Transfer learning is applied using the deep learning models namely, Inception and ResNet, that are fine-tuned for various learning rates and optimizers. The meticulous experimentation carried out reveals that traditional machine learning performs well when trained and tested on a single dataset. However, there is a drastic change in the performance of machine learning models when tested on a different ship dataset. The results show that the deep learning models have better feature detection and thus have better performance when transfer learning is used on various datasets. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.