Intelligent Vision-Enabled Detection of Water-Surface Targets for Video Surveillance in Maritime Transportation

The timely, automatic, and accurate detection of water-surface targets has received significant attention in intelligent vision-enabled maritime transportation systems. The reliable detection results are also beneficial for water quality monitoring in practical applications. However, the visual image quality is often inevitably degraded due to the poor weather conditions, potentially leading to unsatisfactory target detection results. The degraded images could be restored using state-of-the-art visibility enhancement methods. It is still difficult to generate high-quality detection performance due to the unavoidable loss of details in restored images. To alleviate these limitations, we first investigate the influences of visibility enhancement methods on detection results and then propose a neural network-empowered water-surface target detection framework. A data augmentation strategy, which synthetically simulates the degraded images under different weather conditions, is further presented to promote the generalization and feature representation abilities of our network. The proposed detection performance has the capacity of accurately detecting the water-surface targets under different adverse imaging conditions, e.g., haze, low-lightness, and rain. Experimental results on both synthetic and realistic scenarios have illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of detection accuracy and efficacy.