Vessel identification based on automatic hull inscriptions recognition

The identification of ships plays a crucial role in security and managing vessel traffic for ports and onshore facilities. Existing video monitoring systems help visually identify a vessel where other systems are not present or sufficient. Readable vessel plates and hull inscriptions of detected ships in the video stream allow using text location and recognition methods to obtain ships’ identification names or numbers. The obtained information can be then matched with available ship registers. The automation of the process has met many challenges related to the often-low quality of available video streams, heterogeneous regulations on the marking of ships, and the specifics of natural scene text recognition, such as quickly alternating imaging conditions or the interference of the background. The main contribution of this research is a method that can identify any type of vessel in an image that has visible inscriptions (name, registration number) placed on the hull and must be registered in a public registry. The proposed method works with low-quality images with inscriptions placed under different angles and different, readable sizes. Our method recognised 91% of vessels from our test dataset. Obtained identification times have not exceeded 1s. The quality and efficiency of the proposed solution indicate that it is suitable for practical implementation in onshore monitoring systems.