An explainable embedded neural system for on-board ship detection from optical satellite imagery

Automatic ship detection from spaceborne systems such as satellites or aircrafts, raises considerable attention in sea surface monitoring because of the several applications in military and civilian field. In this context, processing satellite images on-board would reduce the latency time especially for emergency situations. In this paper, an hardware-oriented (HO) ship detection system based on a customized Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), here referred to as HO-ShipNet, is proposed and tested on a revised version of the “Ships in Satellite Imagery” (SSI) Kaggle dataset, reporting detection accuracy of up to 95%. Furthermore, the explainability of HO-ShipNet is investigated by means of explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) techniques (i.e., Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanation (LIME) and Occlusion Sensitivuty Analysis (OSA)), in order to understand the reasoning behind the HO-ShipNet decisions by detecting the most important input features and consequently ensure the trustworthiness of the model itself. Finally, HO-ShipNet is also implemented on the heterogeneous Xilinx xc7z045ffg900-2 SoC Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) outperforming state-of-the-art FPGA-based accelerators dealing with high-resolution frames. The promising results encourage the potential deployment of the proposed system for on-board applications.