Ship Detection and Tracking in Inland Waterways Using Improved YOLOv3 and Deep SORT

Ship detection and tracking is an important task in video surveillance in inland waterways. However, ships in inland navigation are faced with accidents such as collisions. For collision avoidance, we should strengthen the monitoring of navigation and the robustness of the entire system. Hence, this paper presents ship detection and tracking of ships using the improved You Only Look Once version 3 (YOLOv3) detection algorithm and Deep Simple Online and Real-time Tracking (Deep SORT) tracking algorithm. Three improvements are made to the YOLOv3 target detection algorithm. Firstly, the Kmeans clustering algorithm is used to optimize the initial value of the anchor frame to make it more suitable for ship application scenarios. Secondly, the output classifier is modified to a single Softmax classifier to suit our ship dataset which has three ship categories and mutual exclusion. Finally, Soft Non-Maximum Suppression (Soft-NMS) is introduced to solve the deficiencies of the Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) algorithm when screening candidate frames. Results showed the mean Average Precision (mAP) and Frame Per Second (FPS) of the improved algorithm are increased by about 5% and 2, respectively, compared with the existing YOLOv3 detecting Algorithm. Then the improved YOLOv3 is applied in Deep Sort and the performance result of Deep Sort showed that, it has greater performance in complex scenes, and is robust to interference such as occlusion and camera movement, compared to state of art algorithms such as KCF, MIL, MOSSE, TLD, and Median Flow. With this improvement, it will help in the safety of inland navigation and protection from collisions and accidents.

Automated summary

Ship detection and tracking in inland waterways is crucial for navigation safety. This paper introduces improvements to the YOLOv3 detection algorithm and its application in Deep SORT tracking algorithm, enhancing performance in ship detection and tracking. The enhanced algorithm shows increased precision and frame rate, with Deep SORT proving superior in complex scenarios.