xView3-SAR: Detecting Dark Fishing Activity Using Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery Fernando S. Paolo, Tsu-ting Tim Lin 2,, Bryce Goodman

Unsustainable fishing practices worldwide pose a major threat to marine resources and ecosystems. Identifying vessels that do not show up in conventional monitoring systems--known as "dark vessels"--is key to managing and securing the health of marine environments. With the rise of satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and modern machine learning (ML), it is now possible to automate detection of dark vessels day or night, under all-weather conditions. SAR images, however, require a domain-specific treatment and are not widely accessible to the ML community. Maritime objects (vessels and offshore infrastructure) are relatively small and sparse, challenging traditional computer vision approaches. We present the largest labeled dataset for training ML models to detect and characterize vessels and ocean structures in SAR imagery.