Toward detection of marine vehicles on horizon from buoy camera

Abstract

This paper presents a new technique for automatic detection of marine vehicles in open sea from a buoy camera system using computer vision approach. Users of such system include border guards, military, port safety and flow management, sanctuary protection personnel. The system is intended to work autonomously, taking images of the surrounding ocean surface and analyzing them on the subject of presence of marine vehicles. The goal of the system is to detect an approximate window around the ship and prepare the small image for transmission and human evaluation. The proposed computer vision-based algorithm combines horizon detection method with edge detection and post-processing. The dataset of 100 images is used to evaluate the performance of proposed technique. We discuss promising results of ship detection and suggest necessary improvements for achieving better performance.