A horizon line annotation tool for streamlining autonomous sea navigation experiments
This tool addresses a domain-specific bottleneck for researchers in marine autonomous navigation by streamlining data annotation for experimental validation.
The authors tackled the problem of annotating horizon lines for autonomous sea navigation experiments by developing the first public annotation software, which makes the sea line annotation process fast and easy.
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