Maritime collisions involving multiple ships are considered rare, but in 2017 several United States Navy vessels were involved in fatal at-sea collisions that resulted in the death of seventeen American Servicemembers. The experimentation introduced in this paper is a direct response to these incidents. We propose a shipboard Collision-At-Sea avoidance system, based on video image processing, that will help ensure the safe stationing and navigation of maritime vessels. Our system leverages a convolutional neural network trained on synthetic maritime imagery in order to detect nearby vessels within a scene, perform heading analysis of detected vessels, and provide an alert in the presence of an inbound vessel. Additionally, we present the Navigational Hazards - Synthetic (NAVHAZ-Synthetic) dataset. This dataset, is comprised of one million annotated images of ten vessel classes observed from virtual vessel-mounted cameras, as well as a human “Topside Lookout” perspective. NAVHAZ-Synthetic includes imagery displaying varying sea-states, lighting conditions, and optical degradations such as fog, sea-spray, and salt-accumulation. We present our results on the use of synthetic imagery in a computer vision based collision-at-sea warning system with promising performance.
Algorithms to automatically recognize ship type from satellite imagery are desired for numerous maritime applications. This task is difficult, and example imagery accurately labeled with ship type is hard to obtain. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise in image recognition settings, but many of these applications rely on the availability of thousands of example images for training. This work attempts to under- stand for which types of ship recognition tasks CNNs might be well suited. We report the results of baseline experiments applying a CNN to several ship type classification tasks, and discuss many of the considerations that must be made in approaching this problem.
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