Vessel Re-identification and Activity Detection in Thermal Domain for Maritime Surveillance
This addresses maritime surveillance challenges for security agencies by enabling nighttime monitoring, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to the thermal domain.
The paper tackles vessel re-identification and activity detection in maritime surveillance using thermal vision to address visibility issues at night, achieving 81.8% Top1 score for re-identification and 72.4% frame mAP for activity detection.
Maritime surveillance is vital to mitigate illegal activities such as drug smuggling, illegal fishing, and human trafficking. Vision-based maritime surveillance is challenging mainly due to visibility issues at night, which results in failures in re-identifying vessels and detecting suspicious activities. In this paper, we introduce a thermal, vision-based approach for maritime surveillance with object tracking, vessel re-identification, and suspicious activity detection capabilities. For vessel re-identification, we propose a novel viewpoint-independent algorithm which compares features of the sides of the vessel separately (separate side-spaces) leveraging shape information in the absence of color features. We propose techniques to adapt tracking and activity detection algorithms for the thermal domain and train them using a thermal dataset we created. This dataset will be the first publicly available benchmark dataset for thermal maritime surveillance. Our system is capable of re-identifying vessels with an 81.8% Top1 score and identifying suspicious activities with a 72.4\% frame mAP score; a new benchmark for each task in the thermal domain.