Abstract
This paper presents an artificial intelligence-based model for the classification of maritime vessel images obtained by cameras operating in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It incorporates both the deep learning techniques for initial image representation and traditional image processing and machine learning methods for subsequent image classification. The presented model is therefore a hybrid approach that uses the Inception v3 deep learning model for the purpose of image vectorization and a combination of SVM, kNN, logistic regression, Naïve Bayes, neural network, and decision tree algorithms for final image classification. The model is trained and tested on a custom dataset consisting of a total of 2915 images of maritime vessels. These images were split into three subsections: training (2444 images), validation (271 images), and testing (200 images). The images themselves encompassed 11 distinctive classes: cargo, container, cruise, fishing, military, passenger, pleasure, sailing, special, tanker, and non-class (objects that can be encountered at sea but do not represent maritime vessels). The presented model accurately classified 86.5% of the images used for training purposes and therefore demonstrated how a relatively straightforward model can still achieve high accuracy and potentially be useful in real-world operational environments aimed at sea surveillance and automatic situational awareness at sea.