Towards parameter-optimized vessel re-identification based on IORnet

Reliable vessel re-identification would enable maritime surveillance systems to analyze the behavior of vessels by drawing their accurate trajectories, when they pass along different camera locations. However, challenging outdoor conditions and varying viewpoint appearances combined with the large size of vessels limit conventional methods to obtain robust re-identification performance. This paper employs CNNs to address these challenges. In this paper, we propose an Identity Oriented Re-identification network (IORnet), which improves the triplet method with a new identity-oriented loss function. The resulting method increases the feature vector similarities between vessel samples belonging to the same vessel identity. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed method achieves 81.5% and 91.2% on mAP and Rank1 scores, respectively. Additionally, we report experimental results with data augmentation and hyper-parameters optimization to facilitate reliable ship re-identification. Finally, we provide our real-world vessel re-identification dataset with various annotated multi-class features to public access.