Robust real-time ship detection and tracking for visual surveillance of cage aquaculture

This paper presents a visual surveillance scheme for cage aquaculture that automatically detects and tracks ships (intruders). For ship detection and tracking, we propose a robust foreground detection and background updating to effectively reduce the influence of sea waves. Furthermore, we propose a fast 4-connected component labeling method to greatly reduce the computational cost associated with the conventional method. Wave ripples are removed from regions with ships. An improved full search algorithm based on adaptive template block matching with a wave ripple removal is presented to quickly, accurately, and reliably track overlapping ships whose scales change. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed schemes have outstanding performance in ship detection and tracking. The proposed visual surveillance system for cage aquaculture triggers an alarm if intruders are detected. The security of cage aquaculture can be increased. The proposed visual surveillance can thus greatly help the popularization of cage aquaculture for ocean farming.

Research highlights
► We propose a visual surveillance scheme for cage aquaculture that automatically detects and tracks ships.
► We propose a fast 4-connected component labeling method to greatly reduce the computational cost associated with the conventional method.
► We propose a two-stage scheme of wave ripple removal to remove wave ripples from regions with ships.
► We propose an improved full search algorithm based on adaptive template block matching with a wave ripple removal to quickly, accurately, and reliably track overlapping ships whose scales change.
► The proposed visual surveillance can greatly help the popularization of cage aquaculture for ocean farming.