A Combo Object Model for Maritime Boat Ramps Traffic Monitoring

Conventional tracking methods are incapable of tracking boats towed by vehicles on boat ramps because the relative geometry of these combined objects changes as they move up and down the ramp. In the context of maritime boat ramp surveillance, fishing trailer boat is the object of interest for monitoring the amount of recreational fishing activities over the time. Instead of tracking trailer boat as a single object, this paper proposes a novel boat-vehicle combo object model, by which each boat is tracked as a combination of a trailered boat and a towing vehicle, and the relationship between these two components is modelled in multi-feature space and traced across consecutive frames. Experimental results show that the proposed combo modelling tracks the object of interest accurately and reliably in real-world boat traffic videos.