Cross-modal Ship Re-identification via Optical and SAR Imagery: A Novel Dataset and Method

📝Paper | 🗃️Dataset | 🤖Models

The official repository for HOSS ReID Dataset and TransOSS.

Abstract

Detecting and tracking ground objects using earth observation imagery remains a significant challenge in the field of remote sensing. Continuous maritime ship tracking is crucial for applications such as maritime search and rescue, law enforcement, and shipping analysis. However, most current ship tracking methods rely on geostationary satellites or video satellites. The former offer low resolution and are susceptible to weather conditions, while the latter have short filming durations and limited coverage areas, making them less suitable for the real-world requirements of ship tracking. To address these limitations, we present the Hybrid Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Ship Re-Identification Dataset (HOSS ReID dataset), designed to evaluate the effectiveness of ship tracking using low-Earth orbit constellations of optical and SAR sensors. This approach ensures shorter re-imaging cycles and enables all-weather tracking. HOSS ReID dataset includes images of the same ship captured over extended periods under diverse conditions, using different satellites of different modalities at varying times and angles. Furthermore, we propose a baseline method for cross-modal ship re-identification, TransOSS, which is built on the Vision Transformer architecture. It refines the patch embedding structure to better accommodate cross-modal tasks, incorporates additional embeddings to introduce more reference information, and employs contrastive learning to pre-train on large-scale optical-SAR image pairs, ensuring the model's ability to extract modality-invariant features.

HOSS ReID Dataset

The HOSS ReID dataset and the associated pretraining dataset are publicly available on zenodo.
The pretraining dataset is constructed based on the SEN1-2 and DFC23 datasets.
To run TransOSS, please organize the data in the following structure under the data directory:

data
├── HOSS
│   ├── bounding_box_test
│   ├── bounding_box_train
│   └── ...
└── OptiSar_Pair
    ├── 0001
    ├── 0002
    └── ...

Pipeline

Requirements

Installation

The Python version we use is 3.9, and the PyTorch version is 2.2.2. It is recommended not to use versions lower than these.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Training

Pretraining

We utilize 4 GPUs for pretraining

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1,2,3 python -m torch.distributed.launch --nproc_per_node=4 --master_port 6667 train_pair.py --config_file configs/pretrain_transoss.yml MODEL.DIST_TRAIN True

Fine-tune

Single GPU fine-tuning

python train.py --config_file configs/hoss_transoss.yml

Multiple GPUs fine-tuning

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 python -m torch.distributed.launch --nproc_per_node=2 --master_port 6667 train.py --config_file configs/hoss_transoss.yml MODEL.DIST_TRAIN True

Evaluation

python test.py --config_file configs/hoss_transoss.yml MODEL.DEVICE_ID "('0')"  TEST.WEIGHT 'weights/HOSS_TransOSS.pth'

Citation

@InProceedings{Wang_2025_ICCV,
    author    = {Wang, Han and Li, Shengyang and Yang, Jian and Liu, Yuxuan and Lv, Yixuan and Zhou, Zhuang},
    title     = {Cross-modal Ship Re-Identification via Optical and SAR Imagery: A Novel Dataset and Method},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2025},
    pages     = {7873-7883}
}

Acknowledgement

Codebase from TransReID, reid-strong-baseline , pytorch-image-models.