STAR-24K: A Public Dataset for Space Common Target Detection

The target detection algorithm based on supervised learning is the current mainstream algorithm for target detection. A high-quality dataset is the prerequisite for the target detection algorithm to obtain good detection performance. The larger the number and quality of the dataset, the stronger the generalization ability of the model, that is, the dataset determines the upper limit of the model learning. The convolutional neural network optimizes the network parameters in a strong supervision method. The error is calculated by comparing the predicted frame with the manually labeled real frame, and then the error is passed into the network for continuous optimization. Strongly supervised learning mainly relies on a large number of images as models for continuous learning, so the number and quality of images directly affect the results of learning. This paper proposes a dataset STAR-24K (meaning a dataset for Space TArget Recognition with more than 24,000 images) for detecting common targets in space. Since there is currently no publicly available dataset for space target detection, we extracted some pictures from a series of channels such as pictures and videos released by the official websites of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and ESA (The European Space Agency) and expanded them to 24,451 pictures. We evaluate popular object detection algorithms to build a benchmark. Our STAR-24K dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/Zzz-zcy/STAR-24K.