# Hull First, Wake Second: Wake-Reliance Suppression for Robust Maritime Vessel Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26665/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

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- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [Right for the Right Reasons: Training Differentiable Models by Constraining their Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03717/) (2017)
- [Large Selective Kernel Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09030/) (2023)
- [PIDNet: A Real-time Semantic Segmentation Network Inspired by PID Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02066/) (2022)
- [SeaDronesSee: A Maritime Benchmark for Detecting Humans in Open Water](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01922/) (2021)
- [Video Processing from Electro-optical Sensors for Object Detection and Tracking in Maritime Environment: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05842/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Maritime vessel detectors often face scenes where hulls are small, low-contrast, or blurred, while wakes are longer and easier to detect. This creates a wake-reliance problem: detectors may miss slow or stationary vessels with weak wakes, or produce false positives on wake-like water clutter. We propose HullWake, a hull-first wake-second framework for robust maritime vessel detection. HullWake separates proposal-centered hull evidence from directional wake context, extracts wake cues with bidirectional proposal-anchored corridors, and suppresses wake-dominant predictions through wake response supervision, wake-attenuated consistency, wake-only confidence suppression, and hull--wake decorrelation. We also introduce a wake-oriented evaluation protocol covering weak/no-wake vessels, wake-like hard negatives, worst-group AP, and confidence drop after wake attenuation. Experiments are conducted on Curated-Wake, a wake-oriented maritime dataset of about 10,000 images curated from Ships/Vessels in Aerial Images, the SMD benchmark, and SeaDronesSee, with newly added detection- and segmentation-level wake annotations. Compared with box-only detectors and mask-supervised segmentation baselines, HullWake improves overall AP, weak/no-wake robustness, wake-like false positives, worst-group AP, and confidence stability after wake attenuation.