Marine Vessel Re-Identification: A Large-Scale Dataset and Global-and-Local Fusion-Based Discriminative Feature Learning

A marine vessel re-identification system has to determine whether or not different images represent the same vessel. Accurate vessel re-identification improves onshore closed-circuit television monitoring in a vessel traffic services system as well as onboard surveillance of surrounding vessels. However, because ships are rigid bodies and the marine environment is harsh, the accurate re-identification of vessels at sea can be very difficult. We describe a marine vessel-re-identification framework, Global-and-Local Fusion-based Multi-view Feature Learning (GLF-MVFL), which is based on a combination of global and fine-grained local features. GLF-MVFL combines cross-entropy loss with our newly-developed orientation-guided quintuplet loss. We exploit intrinsic features of marine vessels to optimize multi-view representation learning for re-identification. GLF-MVFL uses ResNet-50 as the backbone network to extract features for simultaneous quintuple input. It detects and discriminates between features and estimates viewpoints to form a comprehensive re-identification framework. We created an annotated large-scale vessel retrieval dataset, VesselID-539, which contains images from viewpoints similar to those of an autonomous surface vessel, to use in evaluating the performance of the model. Extensive experiments and analysis of the results obtained from using VesselID-539 demonstrate that our approach significantly increases the accuracy of vessel re-identification and is more effective and robust for images from different viewpoints than other approaches.