High-Speed Maritime Object Detection Scheme for the Protection of the Aid to Navigation

• Hyochan Lee,
• Hyunhak Song,
• Sungyoon Cho,
• Kiwon Kwon,
• Sunghyun Park,
• Taeho Im,

Vol. 16, No. 2, February 28, 2022
10.3837/tiis.2022.02.017, Download Paper (Free):

• Aid to Navigation
• Maritime
• computer vision
• Object Detection
• High-Speed Processing

Abstract

Buoys used for Aid to Navigation systems are widely used to guide the sea paths and are powered by batteries, requiring continuous battery replacement. However, since human labor is required to replace the batteries, humans can be exposed to dangerous situation, including even collision with shipping vessels. In addition, Maritime sensors are installed on the route signs, so that these are often damaged by collisions with small and medium-sized ships, resulting in significant financial loss. In order to prevent these accidents, maritime object detection technology is essential to alert ships approaching buoys. Existing studies apply a number of filters to eliminate noise and to detect objects within the sea image. For this process, most studies directly access the pixels and process the images. However, this approach typically takes a long time to process because of its complexity and the requirements of significant amounts of computational power. In an emergent situation, it is important to alarm the vessel's rapid approach to buoys in real time to avoid collisions between vessels and route signs, therefore minimizing computation and speeding up processes are critical operations. Therefore, we propose Fast Connected Component Labeling (FCCL) which can reduce computation to minimize the processing time of filter applications, while maintaining the detection performance of existing methods. The results show that the detection performance of the FCCL is close to 30 FPS - approximately 2-5 times faster, when compared to the existing methods - while the average throughput is the same as existing methods.

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