Abstract
Ship detection and tracking is a basic task in any vessel traffic monitored area, whether marine or inland. It has a major impact on navigational safety and thus different systems and technologies are used to determine the best possible methods of detecting and identifying sailing units. Video monitoring is present in almost all of them, but it is usually operated manually and is used as a backup system. This is because of the difficulties in implementing an efficient and universal automatic detection method that would work in quickly alternating environmental conditions for all kind of sailing units—from kayaks to seagoing merchant vessels. This paper presents a method that allows the detection and tracking of ships using the video streams of existing monitoring systems for ports and rivers. The method and the results of experiments on three sets of data using cameras with different characteristics, settings, and scene locations are presented. The experiments were carried out in variable light and weather conditions, and a wide range of unit types were used as detection objectives. The results confirm the usability of the proposed solution; however, some minor issues were encountered in the presence of ships wakes or highly unfavourable weather conditions.
Highlights
Video surveillance systems are typically used to monitor vessels’ movement on coastal and inland waterways—especially those with heavy traffic, complicated organisation or which are in direct proximity to ports
These systems detect and identify intruders using and fusing information from both underwater and above water with the use of sonars, echosounders [5,6] and autonomous vehicles [7]. In all of these systems, video surveillance helps to visually confirm the identification of a vessel or to monitor non-conventional (according to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS)) units that are not obliged to be equipped with AutomaticIdentifications System (AIS) transponders
The incorrect detection events mainly arose from a few video samples with unfavourable lightning conditions
Summary
Video surveillance systems are typically used to monitor vessels’ movement on coastal and inland waterways—especially those with heavy traffic, complicated organisation or which are in direct proximity to ports. (3) Integrated waterside security systems are developed in sensitive areas (port, naval bases, power plants, etc.) [4] These systems detect and identify intruders using and fusing information from both underwater and above water with the use of sonars, echosounders [5,6] and autonomous vehicles [7]. In all of these systems, video surveillance helps to visually confirm the identification of a vessel or to monitor non-conventional (according to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS)) units that are not obliged to be equipped with AIS transponders.
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