A Field Guide to Satellite Datasets That Actually Contain Ships

What it does This repository is a curated index of satellite imagery datasets annotated for ship detection, segmentation, and classification. The excerpted README focuses heavily on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) collections—SSDD, HRSID, OpenSARship, and others—listing image counts, spatial resolutions, polarizations, and annotation formats for each. The authors state that optical datasets are also included, though the visible portion centers on radar.

The interesting bit The value is in the tedious metadata: spatial resolutions ranging from 0.5 to 25 meters, mixed polarizations, and whether annotations are provided in JSON, XML, or COCO format. It even flags which datasets are currently accessible and which have gone dark.

Key highlights

• Covers major SAR datasets including SSDD, HRSID, LS-SSDD-v1.0, and xView3-SAR with per-dataset specs.
• Breaks down task coverage—detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, classification, regression—in a simple table.
• Notes practical details like image dimensions, bit depth, satellite sources (Sentinel-1, Gaofen-3, TerraSAR-X), and polarization modes.
• Flags dataset availability: some links are live, others are marked inaccessible.

Caveats

• The README is essentially a literature survey with tables; there is no code, models, or unified download tooling here.
• Several datasets listed are no longer accessible or require navigating external institutional portals.

Verdict Worth bookmarking if you are building maritime computer vision models and need to compare SAR resolutions without reading a dozen papers. Skip it if you are looking for training scripts or a unified data loader.