Object detection and ship classification using YOLOv5

Abstract

Using a public dataset of images of maritime vessels provided by Analytics Vidhya, manual annotations were made on a subsample of images with Roboflow using the ground truth classifications provided by the dataset. YOLOv5, a prominent open source family of object detection models that comes with an out-of-the-box pre-training on the Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset, was used to train on annotations of sub-classifications of maritime vessels. YOLOv5 provides significant results in detecting a boat. The training, validation, and test set of images trained YOLOv5 in the cloud using Google Colab. Three of our five subclasses, namely, cruise ships, ROROs (Roll On Roll Off, typically car carriers), and military ships, have very distinct shapes and features and yielded positive results. Two of our subclasses, namely, the tanker and cargo ship, have similar characteristics when the cargo ship is unloaded and not carrying any cargo containers. This yielded interesting misclassifications that could be improved in future work. Our trained model resulted in the validation metric of mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) of 0.932 across all subclassification of ships.