With the recent development of satellites and microsatellite constellations, higher temporal
resolution satellite imagery and larger numbers of satellites have become available. As the availability of
satellite data increases, it is necessary to develop ship detection models that consider specific data
characteristics, such as polarization, spatial resolution, and frequency bands. Among these, to leverage the
distinct features of polarization, we employed a late fusion approach to merge the ship detection results
from Sentinel-1 dual-polarization data. To evaluate the effectiveness of the fusion model, we built four
single training models using two polarizations (VV, VH) and two colormaps (gray, parula), as well as six
multimodal models with late fusion. As a result of comparing the accuracy of the single model and the
fusion model, we found that the accuracy of the fusion model consisting of 1) VH gray colormap and VV
parula colormap, and 2) VH parula colormap and VV parula colormap is higher than that of the single
model (based on intersection over union (IoU) thresholds of 0.4 and 0.5). Each fusion model achieved a
relative accuracy improvement of at least 1.5% and up to 6.5% compared to the single model with the
highest accuracy among the two. The significance of this study is that the late fusion was applied using
both polarization data and colormap information simultaneously. These results suggest that the fusion
model can detect ships more accurately and that colormaps, which have been underexplored in SAR
research, can be a factor in improving accuracy.