Maritime situational awareness using adaptive multi-sensor management under hazy conditions

This paper presents a multi-sensor architecture with an adaptive multi-sensor management system suitable for control and navigation of autonomous maritime vessels in hazy and poor-visibility conditions. This architecture resides in the autonomous maritime vessels. It augments the data from on-board imaging sensors and weather sensors with the AIS data and weather data from sensors on other vessels and the on-shore vessel traffic surveillance system. The combined data is analyzed using computational intelligence and data analytics to determine suitable course of action while utilizing historically learnt knowledge and performing live learning from the current situation. Such framework is expected to be useful in diverse weather conditions and shall be a useful architecture to provide autonomy to maritime vessels.

MSCM-LiFe: Multi-scale cross modal linear feature for horizon detection in maritime images

This paper proposes a new method for horizon detection called the multi-scale cross modal linear feature. This method integrates three different concepts related to the presence of horizon in maritime images to increase the accuracy of horizon detection. Specifically it uses the persistence of horizon in multi-scale median filtering, and its detection as a linear feature commonly detected by two different methods, namely the Hough transform of edgemap and the intensity gradient. We demonstrate the performance of the method over 13 videos comprising of more than 3000 frames and show that the proposed method detects horizon with small error in most of the cases, outperforming three state-of-the-art methods.

Video Processing from Electro-optical Sensors for Object Detection and Tracking in Maritime Environment: A Survey

We present a survey on maritime object detection and tracking approaches, which are essential for the development of a navigational system for autonomous ships. The electro-optical (EO) sensor considered here is a video camera that operates in the visible or the infrared spectra, which conventionally complement radar and sonar and have demonstrated effectiveness for situational awareness at sea has demonstrated its effectiveness over the last few years. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of various approaches of video processing for object detection and tracking in the maritime environment. We follow an approach-based taxonomy wherein the advantages and limitations of each approach are compared. The object detection system consists of the following modules: horizon detection, static background subtraction and foreground segmentation. Each of these has been studied extensively in maritime situations and has been shown to be challenging due to the presence of background motion especially due to waves and wakes. The main processes involved in object tracking include video frame registration, dynamic background subtraction, and the object tracking algorithm itself. The challenges for robust tracking arise due to camera motion, dynamic background and low contrast of tracked object, possibly due to environmental degradation. The survey also discusses multisensor approaches and commercial maritime systems that use EO sensors. The survey also highlights methods from computer vision research which hold promise to perform well in maritime EO data processing. Performance of several maritime and computer vision techniques is evaluated on newly proposed Singapore Maritime Dataset.

Challenges in video based object detection in maritime scenario using computer vision

This paper discusses the technical challenges in maritime image processing and machine vision problems for video streams generated by cameras. Even well documented problems of horizon detection and registration of frames in a video are very challenging in maritime scenarios. More advanced problems of background subtraction and object detection in video streams are very challenging. Challenges arising from the dynamic nature of the background, unavailability of static cues, presence of small objects at distant backgrounds, illumination effects, all contribute to the challenges as discussed here.