Multi-class detection and orientation recognition of vessels in maritime surveillance

For maritime surveillance, collecting information about vessels and their behavior is of vital importance. This implies reliable vessel detection and determination of the viewing angle to a vessel, which can help in analyzing the vessel behavior and in re-identification. This paper presents a vessel classification and orientation recognition system for maritime surveillance. For this purpose, we have established two novel multi-class vessel detection and vessel orientation datasets, provided to open public access. Each dataset contains 10,000 training and 1,000 evaluation images with 31,078 vessel labels (10 vessel types and 5 orientation classes). We deploy VGG/SSD to train two separate CNN models for multi-class detection and for orientation recognition of vessels. Both trained models provide a reliable F1 score of 82% and 76%, respectively.