Yassir Zardoua

Yassir Zardoua, Bilal Sebbar, Moussab Chbeine et al.

In recent years, maritime traffic has increased, especially in seaborne trade. To ensure safety, security, and environmental protection, various systems have been deployed, often combining data for improved effectiveness. One key application of this combined data is tracking targets at sea, where the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and X-band marine radar are crucial. Recently, there has been growing interest in using visual data from cameras to enhance tracking. This has led to the development of several tracking algorithms based on image processing. While much of the existing literature addresses data fusion, there hasn't been much focus on why integrating image processing systems is important given the existence of the other systems. In our paper, we aim to analyze these surveillance systems and highlight the reasons for integrating image processing systems. Our main goal is to show how this integration can improve maritime security, offering practical insights into enhancing safety and protection at sea.

Yassir Zardoua, Boulaala Mohammed, Mhamed El Mrabet et al.

Accurate and fast sea horizon detection is vital for tasks in autonomous navigation and maritime security, such as video stabilization, target region reduction, precise tracking, and obstacle avoidance. This paper introduces a novel sea horizon detector from RGB videos, focusing on rapid and effective sea noise suppression while preserving weak horizon edges. Line fitting methods are subsequently employed on filtered edges for horizon detection. We address the filtering problem by extracting line segments with a very low edge threshold, ensuring the detection of line segments even in low-contrast horizon conditions. We show that horizon line segments have simple and relevant properties in RGB images, which we exploit to suppress noisy segments. Then we use the surviving segments to construct a filtered edge map and infer the horizon from the filtered edges. We propose a careful incorporation of temporal information for horizon inference and experimentally show its effectiveness. We address the computational constraint by providing a vectorized implementation for efficient CPU execution, and leveraging image downsizing with minimal loss of accuracy on the original size. Moreover, we contribute a public horizon line dataset to enrich existing data resources. Our algorithm's performance is rigorously evaluated against state-of-the-art methods, and its components are validated through ablation experiments. Source code and dataset files are available at: https://github.com/Zardoua-Yassir/A_fast_horizon_detector_and_a_new_annotated_dataset_for_maritime_video_processing

Yassir Zardoua, Abdelhamid El Wahabi, Mohammed Boulaala et al.

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