A horizon line annotation tool for streamlining autonomous sea navigation experiments

Horizon line (or sea line) detection (HLD) is a critical component in multiple marine autonomous navigation tasks, such as identifying the navigation area (i.e., the sea), obstacle detection and geo-localization, and digital video stabilization. A recent survey highlighted several weaknesses of such detectors, particularly on sea conditions lacking from the most extensive dataset currently used by HLD researchers. Experimental validation of more robust HLDs involves collecting an extensive set of these lacking sea conditions and annotating each collected image with the correct position and orientation of the horizon line. The annotation task is daunting without a proper tool. Therefore, we present the first public annotation software with tailored features to make the sea line annotation process fast and easy. The software is available at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1c0ZmvYDckuQCPIWfh_70P7E1A_DWlIvF?usp=sharing

A Comparison of AIS, X-Band Marine Radar Systems and Camera Surveillance Systems in the Collection of Tracking Data

Maritime traffic has increased in recent years, especially in terms of seaborne trade. To ensure safety, security, and protection of the marine environment, several systems have been deployed. To overcome some of their inconveniences, the collected data is typically fused. The fused data is used for various purposes, one of our interest is target tracking. The most relevant systems in that context are AIS and X-band marine radar. Many works consider that visual data provided by camera surveillance systems enable additional advantages. Therefore, many tracking algorithms using visual data (images) have been developed. Yet, there is little emphasis on the reasons making the integration of camera systems important. Thus, our main aim in this paper is to analyze the aforementioned surveillance systems for target tracking and conclude some of the maritime security improvements resulted from the integration of cameras to the overall maritime surveillance system.

A Horizon Detection Algorithm for Maritime Surveillance

The horizon line is a valuable feature in the maritime environment as it has a high persistence when compared to other features (e.g., shore corners, waves). It is used in several applications, especially in maritime surveillance. The task of horizon detection may be easy for humans, but it is hard on computers due to the high change of color and texture on maritime scenes. Moreover, the computational complexity is an important constraint to take into account while developing the algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new method that we expect to enhance the state-of-the-art.