Detection-Based Object Tracking Applied to Remote Ship Inspection

We propose a detection-based tracking system for automatically processing maritime ship inspection videos and predicting suspicious areas where cracks may exist. This system consists of two stages. Stage one uses a state-of-the-art object detection model, i.e., RetinaNet, which is customized with certain modifications and the optimal anchor setting for detecting cracks in the ship inspection images/videos. Stage two is an enhanced tracking system including two key components. The first component is a state-of-the-art tracker, namely, Channel and Spatial Reliability Tracker (CSRT), with improvements to handle model drift in a simple manner. The second component is a tailored data association algorithm which creates tracking trajectories for the cracks being tracked. This algorithm is based on not only the intersection over union (IoU) of the detections and tracking updates but also their respective areas when associating detections to the existing trackers. Consequently, the tracking results compensate for the detection jitters which could lead to both tracking jitter and creation of redundant trackers. Our study shows that the proposed detection-based tracking system has achieved a reasonable performance on automatically analyzing ship inspection videos. It has proven the feasibility of applying deep neural network based computer vision technologies to automating remote ship inspection. The proposed system is being matured and will be integrated into a digital infrastructure which will facilitate the whole ship inspection process.