Water Region and Multiple Ship Detection for Port Surveillance

In this paper, we present a robust and accurate multiple ship detection system for port surveillance. First, water region is detected using a region-based technique. Second, ships are located by a cabin detector for the same port surveillance sequences. Third, a verification process is performed to remove the false detections of ships using the detected water region as contextual cues. We have analyzed our water region detection algorithm by experimenting on 5 sequences and we have found that it achieves an average pixel classification precision of 96.9% and a recall of 91.8%. The multiple ship detection system is tested on 3 different surveillance sequences. We successfully detect 133 ships out of 150 ships with a precision of 87.5% and a recall of 88.7%.