Improved Vision-to-Chart Buoy Association with Learned World-to-Image Projection

This report presents a lightweight modification to the DETR-based fusion transformer baseline for the MaCVi 2026 Vision-to-Chart data association challenge. The challenge baseline decoder receives per-buoy queries encoding world-space distance and bearing, forcing the transformer to implicitly learn the complex geometric projection from world coordinates to image pixels. Instead, this work trains an additional dedicated MLP, QueryMLP, to explicitly predict the buoy's waterline contact point in the image from chart measurements and IMU orientation data. The predicted pixel coordinates are appended to the baseline decoder query vector, providing a direct spatial prior per buoy and reducing the geometric reasoning burden on the transformer decoder. On the challenge leaderboard, the presented approach achieves an Overall score of 0.7386, with F1 = 0.8055 and mIoU = 0.6718, on the held-out test set, placing second among all submissions.

Synthetic-to-Real Domain Bridging for Single-View 3D Reconstruction of Ships for Maritime Monitoring

Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of ships is an important part of maritime monitoring, allowing improved visualization, inspection, and decision-making in real-world monitoring environments. However, most state-ofthe-art 3D reconstruction methods require multi-view supervision, annotated 3D ground truth, or are computationally intensive, making them impractical for real-time maritime deployment. In this work, we present an efficient pipeline for single-view 3D reconstruction of real ships by training entirely on synthetic data and requiring only a single view at inference. Our approach uses the Splatter Image network, which represents objects as sparse sets of 3D Gaussians for rapid and accurate reconstruction from single images. The model is first fine-tuned on synthetic ShapeNet vessels and further refined with a diverse custom dataset of 3D ships, bridging the domain gap between synthetic and real-world imagery. We integrate a state-of-the-art segmentation module based on YOLOv8 and custom preprocessing to ensure compatibility with the reconstruction network. Postprocessing steps include real-world scaling, centering, and orientation alignment, followed by georeferenced placement on an interactive web map using AIS metadata and homography-based mapping. Quantitative evaluation on synthetic validation data demonstrates strong reconstruction fidelity, while qualitative results on real maritime images from the ShipSG dataset confirm the potential for transfer to operational maritime settings. The final system provides interactive 3D inspection of real ships without requiring real-world 3D annotations. This pipeline provides an efficient, scalable solution for maritime monitoring and highlights a path toward real-time 3D ship visualization in practical applications. Interactive demo: https://dlr-mi.github.io/ship3d-demo/.

The 2nd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision 2024

The 2nd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2024 addresses maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV). Three challenges categories are considered: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking with Re-identification, (ii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and Detection, (iii) USV-based Maritime Boat Tracking. The USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and Detection features three sub-challenges, including a new embedded challenge addressing efficicent inference on real-world embedded devices. This report offers a comprehensive overview of the findings from the challenges. We provide both statistical and qualitative analyses, evaluating trends from over 195 submissions. All datasets, evaluation code, and the leaderboard are available to the public at https://macvi.org/workshop/macvi24.

Look ATME: The Discriminator Mean Entropy Needs Attention

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are successfully used for image synthesis but are known to face instability during training. In contrast, probabilistic diffusion models (DMs) are stable and generate high-quality images, at the cost of an expensive sampling procedure. In this paper, we introduce a simple method to allow GANs to stably converge to their theoretical optimum, while bringing in the denoising machinery from DMs. These models are combined into a simpler model (ATME) that only requires a forward pass during inference, making predictions cheaper and more accurate than DMs and popular GANs. ATME breaks an information asymmetry existing in most GAN models in which the discriminator has spatial knowledge of where the generator is failing. To restore the information symmetry, the generator is endowed with knowledge of the entropic state of the discriminator, which is leveraged to allow the adversarial game to converge towards equilibrium. We demonstrate the power of our method in several image-to-image translation tasks, showing superior performance than state-of-the-art methods at a lesser cost. Code is available at https://github.com/DLR-MI/atme