M$^{2}$SODAI: Multi-Modal Maritime Object Detection Dataset With RGB and Hyperspectral Image Sensors

Object detection in aerial images is a growing area of research, with maritime object detection being a particularly important task for reliable surveillance, monitoring, and active rescuing. Notwithstanding astonishing advances of computer visiontechnologies, detecting ships and floating matters in these images are challenging due to factors such as object distance. What makes it worse is pervasive sea surface effects such as sunlight reflection, wind, and waves. Hyperspectral image (HSI) sensors, providing more than 100 channels in wavelengths of visible and near-infrared, can extract intrinsic information of materials from a few pixels of HSIs.The advent of HSI sensors motivates us to leverage HSIs to circumvent false positives due to the sea surface effects.Unfortunately, there are few public HSI datasets due to the high cost and labor involved in collecting them, hindering object detection research based on HSIs. We have collected and annotated a new dataset called ``Multi-Modal Ship and flOating matter Detection in Aerial Images (M$^{2}$SODAI),'', which includes synchronized image pairs of RGB and HSI data, along with bounding box labels for nearly 6,000 instances per category. We also propose a new multi-modal extension of the feature pyramid network called DoubleFPN.Extensive experiments on our benchmark demonstrate that fusion of RGB and HSI data can enhance mAP, especially in the presence of the sea surface effects.