Identification of shipping signals with few-shot learning: A distribution-aware approach

Effective identification of shipping signals in underwater environments is essential for maritime operations and ecosystem monitoring. Traditional models require extensive data for each ship type, posing a significant challenge owing to the difficulty of collecting diverse signals, particularly for vessels with security constraints. Few-shot learning offers a promising solution by enabling ships identification from minimal data through accurate template matching. This study proposes a novel few-shot learning approach that leverages stochastic information within and between ship types to improve identification accuracy using limited labeled data. The proposed model is designed based on a Siamese prototype network that integrates intra- and inter-category dissimilarities, employing cosine distance to estimate similarity while accounting for variance within the data. It achieves robust performance even when trained on limited samples with an average accuracy of 87.81% in five-way identification. In addition, its ability to generalize to unseen ship classes highlights its potential for real-time marine applications, further confirming the effectiveness of few-shot learning in constrained data scenarios. This approach provides valuable insights into designing adaptive, efficient systems for underwater signal detection and has potential applications across a wide range of acoustic processing tasks.