Detection and tracking of ships in open sea with rapidly moving buoy-mounted camera system

Abstract Visual surveillance in the maritime domain has been explored for more than a decade. Although it has produced a number of working systems and resulted in a mature technology, surveillance has been restricted to the port facilities or areas close to the coast line assuming a fixed-camera scenario. This paper presents a novel algorithm for open-sea visual maritime surveillance. We explore a challenging situation with a forward-looking camera mounted on a buoy or other floating platform. The proposed algorithm detects, localizes, and tracks ships in the field of view of the camera. Specifically, developed algorithm is uniquely designed to handle rapidly moving camera. Its performance is robust in the presence of a random relatively-large camera motion. In the context of ship detection we developed a new horizon detection scheme for a complex maritime domain. The performance of our algorithm and its comprising elements is evaluated. Ship detection precision of 88% is achieved on a large dataset collected from a prototype system.

[1]  Heng Li,et al.  Automatic Recognition of Ship Types from Infrared Images Using Support Vector Machines , 2008, 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering.

[2]  Mubarak Shah,et al.  Visual surveillance in maritime port facilities , 2008, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[3]  Wageeh Boles,et al.  Fixed-Wing Attitude Estimation Using Computer Vision Based Horizon Detection , 2007 .

[4]  Khan M. Iftekharuddin,et al.  Detection and tracking of targets in infrared images using Bayesian techniques , 2009 .

[5]  Jian Liu,et al.  INFRARED IMAGE SEGMENTATION VIA INTELLIGENT GENETIC ALGORITHM BASED ON 2-D MAXIMUM FUZZY ENTROPY , 2004 .

[6]  Antonio Criminisi,et al.  Shape from Texture: Homogeneity Revisited , 2000, BMVC.

[7]  Michael Teutsch,et al.  Classification of small boats in infrared images for maritime surveillance , 2010, 2010 International WaterSide Security Conference.

[8]  Hai Wei,et al.  Automated intelligent video surveillance system for ships , 2009, Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[9]  Peter G. Ifju,et al.  Vision-guided flight stability and control for micro air vehicles , 2003, Adv. Robotics.

[10]  Borko Furht,et al.  A Hybrid Color-Based Foreground Object Detection Method for Automated Marine Surveillance , 2005, ACIVS.

[11]  Naouma Kourti,et al.  An Open Source Framework for Integration of Vessel Positions Detected in Spaceborne SAR Imagery in Operational Fisheries Monitoring and Control , 2005 .

[12]  Michael Teutsch,et al.  Detection and classification of man-made offshore objects in TerraSAR-X and RapidEye imagery: Selected results of the DeMarine-DEKO project , 2011, OCEANS 2011 IEEE - Spain.

[13]  R. E. Kalman,et al.  A New Approach to Linear Filtering and Prediction Problems , 2002 .

[14]  Yaser Sheikh,et al.  Shape from Dynamic Texture for Planes , 2006, 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'06).

[15]  Xiaorong Shen,et al.  A robust adaptive horizon recognizing algorithm based on projection , 2011 .

[16]  Raja Sengupta,et al.  Obstacle Detection for Small Autonomous Aircraft Using Sky Segmentation , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[17]  Donald Reid.  An algorithm for tracking multiple targets , 1978 .

[18]  Luca Iocchi,et al.  Argos - a Video Surveillance System for boat Traffic Monitoring in Venice , 2009, Int. J. Pattern Recognit. Artif. Intell..

[19]  Conrad Sanderson,et al.  On statistical approaches to target silhouette classification in difficult conditions , 2008, Digit. Signal Process..

[20]  Rama Chellappa,et al.  Video Mensuration Using a Stationary Camera , 2006, ECCV.

[21]  Dmitry B. Goldgof,et al.  Tracking Ships from Fast Moving Camera through Image Registration , 2010, 2010 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

[22]  Zhao-Ying Zhou,et al.  Vision-based horizon extraction for micro air vehicle flight control , 2005, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas..

[23]  Ramakant Nevatia,et al.  Camera calibration from video of a walking human , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[24]  Kalyan Moy Gupta,et al.  Case-Based Collective Inference for Maritime Object Classification , 2009, ICCBR.

[25]  A. Benetazzo.  Accurate measurement of six Degree Of Freedom small-scale ship motion through analysis of one camera images , 2011 .

[26]  Xiaochun Cao,et al.  Automatic Geo-Registration for Port Surveillance , 2010, Int. J. Pattern Recognit. Artif. Intell..

[27]  Jan Flusser,et al.  Image registration methods: a survey , 2003, Image Vis. Comput..

[28]  Daniel D. Morris,et al.  Ship recognition using optical imagery for harbor surveillance , 2007 .

[29]  Jundong Zhang,et al.  Video Stabilizing and Tracking by Horizontal Line for Maritime Cruise Ship , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation.

[30]  Silvano Di Zenzo,et al.  A note on the gradient of a multi-image , 1986, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[31]  Dmitry B. Goldgof,et al.  Autonomous buoy platform for low-cost visual maritime surveillance: design and initial deployment , 2009, Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[32]  N. Otsu.  A threshold selection method from gray level histograms , 1979 .

[33]  Zigmund Orlov,et al.  Robust layer-based boat detection and multi-target-tracking in maritime environments , 2010, 2010 International WaterSide Security Conference.

[34]  Daniel D. Morris,et al.  Image-based motion stabilization for maritime surveillance , 2007, Electronic Imaging.

[35]  Pierre Valin,et al.  Comparative implementation of two fusion schemes for multiple complementary FLIR imagery classifiers , 2006, Inf. Fusion.

[36]  M. Teal,et al.  Target identification in a complex maritime scene , 1999 .

[37]  Dmitry B. Goldgof,et al.  Detection and tracking of marine vehicles in video , 2008, 2008 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

[38]  David S. Doermann,et al.  Tools and techniques for video performance evaluation , 2000, Proceedings 15th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. ICPR-2000.

[39]  Carlos Miravet,et al.  A decision support system for ship identification based on the curvature scale space representation , 2005, SPIE Security + Defence.

[40]  Michael Bosse,et al.  SeeCoast port surveillance , 2006, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[41]  Hsin-Hung Chen,et al.  Vision-based tracking with projective mapping for parameter identification of remotely operated vehicles , 2008 .

[42]  Jin Liu,et al.  Unified mean shift segmentation and graph region merging algorithm for infrared ship target segmentation , 2007 .