Massive amount of water level data has been collected by using Internet of Things (IoT) techniques in the Yangtze River and other rivers. In this paper, utilizing these data to construct deep neural network models for water level prediction is focused. To achieve higher accuracy, both the factors of time and locations of data collection sensors are considered to perform prediction. And the network structures of gated recurrent unit (GRU) and convolutional neural network (CNN) are combined to build a CNN-GRU model in which the GRU part learns the changing trend of water level, and the CNN part learns the spatial correlation among water level data observed from adjacent water stations. The CNN-GRU model that using data from multiple locations to predict the water level of the middle location has higher accuracy than the model only based on GRU and other state-of-the-art methods including autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA), wavelet-based artificial neural network (WANN) and long-short term memory model (LSTM), because of its ability to decrease the affections of abnormal value and data randomness of a single water station to some extent. The results are verified on an experiment dataset that including 30-year observed data of water level at several collection stations in the Yangtze River. For forecasting the 8-o’clock water levels of future 5 days, accuracy of the CNN-GRU model is better than that of ARIMA, WANN and LSTM models with three evaluation factors including Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE), average relative error (MRE) and root mean square error (RMSE).

We present a survey on marine object detection based on deep neural network approaches, which are state-of-the-art approaches for the development of autonomous ship navigation, maritime surveillance, shipping management, and other intelligent transportation system applications in the future. The fundamental task of maritime transportation surveillance and autonomous ship navigation is to construct a reachable visual perception system that requires high efficiency and high accuracy of marine object detection. Therefore, high-performance deep learning-based algorithms and high-quality marine-related datasets need to be summarized. This survey focuses on summarizing the methods and application scenarios of maritime object detection, analyzes the characteristics of different marine-related datasets, highlights the marine detection application of the YOLO series model, and also discusses the current limitations of object detection based on deep learning and possible breakthrough directions. The large-scale, multiscenario industrialized neural network training is an indispensable link to solve the practical application of marine object detection. A widely accepted and standardized large-scale marine object verification dataset should be proposed.

Recognizing objects from camera images is an important field for researching smart ships and intelligent navigation. In sea transportation, navigation marks indicating the features of navigational environments (e.g. channels, special areas, wrecks, etc.) are focused in this paper. A fine-grained classification model named RMA (ResNet-Multiscale-Attention) based on deep learning is proposed to analyse the subtle and local differences among navigation mark types for the recognition of navigation marks. In the RMA model, an attention mechanism based on the fusion of feature maps with three scales is proposed to locate attention regions and capture discriminative characters that are important to distinguish the slight differences among similar navigation marks. Experimental results on a dataset with 10260 navigation mark images showed that the RMA has an accuracy about 96% to classify 42 types of navigation marks, and the RMA is better than ResNet-50 model with which the accuracy is about 94%. The visualization analyses showed that the RMA model can extract the attention regions and the characters of navigation marks.

Ship detection is one of the most important research contents of ship intelligent navigation and monitoring. As a supplement to classical navigational equipment such as radar and the Automatic Identification System (AIS), target detection based on computer vision and deep learning has become a new important method. A target detector called YOLOv3 has the advantages of detection speed and accuracy and meets the real-time requirements for ship detection. However, YOLOv3 has a large number of backbone network parameters and requires high hardware performance, which is not conducive to the popularization of applications. On the basis of YOLOv3, this paper proposes a lightweight ship detection model (LSDM) in which the backbone network is improved by using dense connection inspired from DenseNet, and the feature pyramid networks are improved by using spatial separation convolution to replace normal convolution. The two improvements reduce parameters and optimize the network structure greatly. The experimental results show that, with only one-third of parameters of YOLOv3, the LSDM has higher accuracy and speed for ship detection. In addition, the LSDM is simplified further by reducing the number of densely connected units to form a model called LSDM-tiny. The experimental results show that, LSDM-tiny has similar detection speed with YOLOv3-tiny, but has a lot higher accuracy.

With accumulation of data and development of artificial intelligence, human activity recognition attracts lots of attention from researchers. Many classic machine learning algorithms, such as artificial neural network, feed forward neural network, K-nearest neighbors, and support vector machine, achieve good performance for detecting human activity. However, these algorithms have their own limitations and their prediction accuracy still has space to improve. In this study, we focus on K-nearest neighbors (KNN) and solve its limitations. Firstly, kernel method is employed in model KNN, which transforms the input features to be the high-dimensional features. The proposed model KNN with kernel (K-KNN) improves the accuracy of classification. Secondly, a novel reduced kernel method is proposed and used in model K-KNN, which is named as Reduced Kernel KNN (RK-KNN). It reduces the processing time and enhances the classification performance. Moreover, this study proposes an approach of defining number of K neighbors, which reduces the parameter dependency problem. Based on the experimental works, the proposed RK-KNN obtains the best performance in benchmarks and human activity datasets compared with other models. It has super classification ability in human activity recognition. The accuracy of human activity data is 91.60 for HAPT and 92.67 for Smartphone, respectively. Averagely, compared with the conventional KNN, the proposed model RK-KNN increases the accuracy by 1.82 and decreases standard deviation by 0.27. The small gap of processing time between KNN and RK-KNN in all datasets is only 1.26 seconds.

In the maritime scene, visible light sensors installed on ships have difficulty accurately detecting the sea–sky line (SSL) and its nearby ships due to complex environments and six-degrees-of-freedom movement. Aimed at this problem, this paper combines the camera and inertial sensor data, and proposes a novel maritime target detection algorithm based on camera motion attitude. The algorithm mainly includes three steps, namely, SSL estimation, SSL detection, and target saliency detection. Firstly, we constructed the camera motion attitude model by analyzing the camera’s six-degrees-of-freedom motion at sea, estimated the candidate region (CR) of the SSL, then applied the improved edge detection algorithm and the straight-line fitting algorithm to extract the optimal SSL in the CR. Finally, in the region of ship detection (ROSD), an improved visual saliency detection algorithm was applied to extract the target ships. In the experiment, we constructed SSL and its nearby ship detection dataset that matches the camera’s motion attitude data by real ship shooting, and verified the effectiveness of each model in the algorithm through comparative experiments. Experimental results show that compared with the other maritime target detection algorithm, the proposed algorithm achieves a higher detection accuracy in the detection of the SSL and its nearby ships, and provides reliable technical support for the visual development of unmanned ships.