Integrated Visual Information for Maritime Surveillance

Surveillance systems for the maritime domain are becoming more and more important. However, available technology still provides only a limited support to this kind of applications. In this book chapter, we describe a framework for intelligent surveillance in the maritime domain, designed for fusing information from heterogeneous sources. Electro-optical cameras are used as main sensors, in order to enhance the functionalities of current Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) systems. Furthermore, the framework can be used for the detection of non-cooperative targets and can be deployed in populated areas, where radar-based systems cannot be used due to electromagnetic radiation emissions. A quantitative evaluation of the proposed approach has been carried out on a large dataset of images and videos, collected from di different real sites. Such data are publicly available from the MarDCT Maritime Detection , Classification and Tracking dataset.