Popeye: A Unified Visual-Language Model for Multi-Source Ship Detection from Remote Sensing Imagery

Ship detection needs to identify ship locations from remote sensing (RS) scenes. However, due to different imaging payloads, various appearances of ships, and complicated background interference from the bird's eye view, it is difficult to set up a unified paradigm for achieving multi-source ship detection. Therefore, in this article, considering that the large language models (LLMs) emerge the powerful generalization ability, a novel unified visual-language model called Popeye is proposed for multi-source ship detection from RS imagery. First, to bridge the interpretation gap between multi-source images for ship detection, a novel image-instruction-answer way is designed to integrate the various ship detection ways (e.g., horizontal bounding box (HBB), oriented bounding box (OBB)) into a unified labeling paradigm. Then, in view of this, a cross-modal image interpretation method is developed for the proposed Popeye to enhance interactive comprehension ability between visual and language content, which can be easily migrated into any multi-source ship detection task. Subsequently, owing to objective domain differences, a knowledge adaption mechanism is designed to adapt the pre-trained visual-language knowledge from the nature scene into the RS domain for multi-source ship detection. In addition, the segment anything model (SAM) is also seamlessly integrated into the proposed Popeye to achieve pixel-level ship segmentation without additional training costs. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on the newly constructed instruction dataset named MMShip, and the results indicate that the proposed Popeye outperforms current specialist, open-vocabulary, and other visual-language models for zero-shot multi-source ship detection.