Innovative video analytics for maritime surveillance

In this paper, we are presenting a new software dedicated to maritime surveillance and security named AUTOMATIC SEA VISION^® (ASV) (Waquet, 2007) ASV is the first entirely automatic optical software processing (video analytics) providing a smart solution to maritime safety and security issues, whether the intended use is for applications on board ships, or for protection of critical coastal areas and port facilities. The software processes in real time the output from multiple sensors (mainly IR camera, but also GPS, Inertial Navigation Unit...) in order to automatically detect any boat or object for a 24/7 surveillance. We rely on maritime environment and IR sensor data specificities to develop tailored algorithms to perform automatic object detection. These algorithms have been packaged into a complete solution which performs from data acquisition through a user friendly graphical user interface (GUI). Extensive tests have been carried out to validate our solution. We present a quantitative evaluation done on ground truth data. System performance has been calculated using Detection/False Alarm rates over multiple sequences acquired from numerous cameras. Moreover, qualitative evaluations have demonstrated the robustness of the system in numerous different weather conditions. The last section of this paper tackles algorithms enhancements as well as future evolutions of the system.