Utilizing Elephant Herd-Inspired Spiking Neural Networks for Enhanced Ship Detection and Classification in Marine Scene Matching.

AbstractIn the realm of marine intelligence, effective ship classification across vast oceanic expanses is pivotal. Despite strides in conventional identification techniques, existing methods exhibit limitations in terms of effectiveness, robustness, and overall performance. This paper introduces a novel Elephant Herd optimization based Spiking Neural Networks (EHO-SNN) for discerning large ships, small vessels, and the absence of ships. Initial satellite images from the Airbus dataset capture ships at sea, subjected to preprocessing <italic>via</italic> the wavelet transform-based Retinex algorithm (WRA) to eliminate noise and fog artifacts. Deep learning mobile net facilitates feature extraction, while the Elephant Herd algorithm culls irrelevant features, honing in on the most pertinent ones. Finally, the classification through a spiking neural network, distinguishing between large ships, small vessels, and the absence of ships. Detected large and small ships are accurately positioned within a selected scene, while the absence of a ship terminates the process. The Proposed EHO-SNN model attains an impressive classification accuracy of 99.10%. Notably, it surpasses OMRCNN-SHD, Efficient Net, and AN-YOLOv4 by 1.15%, 12.30%, and 7.79%, respectively, thereby advancing overall accuracy in ship classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]