Awesome Waterborne Transportation Systems

Overview

• Teams
• Workshops
• Surveys
• Datasets
• Uni-Modal Perception
  • Detection
    • Small Object Detection
  • Segmentation
  • Tracking
  • Mapping
  • Trajectory Prediction
  • Change Detection
  • Depth Estimation
  • Diffusion
  • Image Enhancement
• Multi-Modal Perception
  • Radar-Camera
  • AIS-Camera
  • Marine Radar-Camera
  • LiDAR-Camera
  • RGB-IR

Teams

• WaterScenes [Website] [Github]

  Yancheng Institute of Technology

• MAP Group [Website]

  Wuhan University of Technology

• Avalon [Website]

  University of Tübingen

• Visual Cognitive Systems (ViCos) Laboratory [Website] [Datasets]

  University of Ljubljana

Workshops

• MaCVi 2026

• MaCVi 2025

• MaCVi 2024

  • The 2nd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2024 [Website] [Results] [Paper List]
  • Baseline: SeaDronesSee: A Maritime Benchmark for Detecting Humans in Open Water [SeaDroneSee] [Paper]
  • 2023 - ReIDTracker Sea: the technical report of BoaTrack and SeaDronesSee-MOT challenge at MaCVi [SeaDroneSee-MOT BoaTrack] WACV Workshop [Paper] (🥈 in UAV-based Multi-Object Tracking, 🥉 in USV-based Multi-Object Tracking)
  • 2023 - [DLR-BoaTrack]: Improving YOLOv8 with Scattering Transform and Attention for Maritime Awareness [SeaDroneSee-MOT BoaTrack] ISPA [Paper] (+BoT-SORT, 🥉 in UAV-based Multi-Object Tracking)
  • 2024 - SeaDSC: A Video-Based Unsupervised Method for Dynamic Scene Change Detection in Unmanned Surface Vehicles [RoboWhaler] WACV Workshop [Paper]
  • 2024 - [MG-MOT] Sea You Later: Metadata-Guided Long-Term Re-Identification for UAV-Based Multi-Object Tracking [SeaDronesSee-MOT] WACV Workshop [Paper]

• MaCVi 2023

  • The 1nd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023 [Website] [Results] [Paper List]
  • Baseline: SeaDronesSee: A Maritime Benchmark for Detecting Humans in Open Water [SeaDroneSee] [Paper]
  • 2023 - A Novel Framework to Evaluate and Train Object Detection Models for Real-Time Victims Search and Rescue at Sea with Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems Using High-Fidelity Dynamic Marine Simulation Environment [SeaDroneSee] [Paper]
  • 2023 - Improving the Detection of Small Oriented Objects in Aerial Images [Paper]
  • 2023 - YOLOv7-Sea: Object Detection of Maritime UAV Images Based on Improved YOLOv7 [Paper]

Surveys

• 2017 - Video Processing From Electro-Optical Sensors for Object Detection and Tracking in a Maritime Environment: A Survey TITS [Paper]
• 2022 - Deep Learning-Based Detection from the Perspective of Small or Tiny Objects: A Survey Image and Vision Computing [Paper]
• 2023 - Deep learning-based object detection in maritime unmanned aerial vehicle imagery: Review and experimental comparisons EAAI [Paper]
• 2023 - Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks TPAMI [Paper]
• 2024 - A Review of Small Object Detection Based on Deep Learning Image and Vision Computing [Paper]
• 2024 - Remote Sensing Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era—A Review Remote Sensing [Paper]
• 2025 - A Guide to Image- and Video-Based Small Object Detection Using Deep Learning: Case Study of Maritime Surveillance TITS [Paper]
• 2025 - A Survey of Small Object Detection Based on Deep Learning in Aerial Images Applied Intelligence [Paper]

Datasets

Name	Year	Publish	Task	Affiliation	Link
MarDCT	2015		Classification Object Detection Tracking	Sapienza University of Rome	Website Paper
MODD	2016		Object Detection Semantic Segmentation	University of Ljubljana	Website Paper Github
SMD	2017		Object Detection Object Tracking	The Arctic University of Norway	Website Paper Github
Visual-Inertial-Canoe	2018		SLAM	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Website Paper
MODD2	2018		Object Detection Semantic Segmentation	University of Ljubljana	Website Paper Github
SeaShips	2018		Object Detection	Wuhan University	Paper Github
MaSTr1325	2019		Semantic Segmentation	University of Ljubljana	Website Paper Github
Tampere-WaterSeg	2019		Semantic Segmentation	Tampere University	Paper
MariShipSeg-HEU	2020		Semantic Segmentation	Harbin Engineering University	Paper Github
MCShips	2020		Object Detection	Zheng Yitong and Zhang Shun	Paper Github
WaterV2	2020		Semantic Segmentation	Louisiana State University	Website Paper Github
MID	2020		Object Detection	Shanghai University	Paper Github
ABOShips	2021		Object Detection	Åbo Akademi University	Dataset Paper
WSODD	2021		Object Detection Instance Segmentation	Beijing Institute of Technology	Paper Github
USVInland	2021		SLAM Stereo Matching Water Segmentation	ORCA-tech	Weibsite Paper Github
FloW	2021		Object Detection Multimodal Object Detection	ORCA-tech	Website Paper Github
SeaDronesSee	2021		Object Detection Object Tracking	University of Tuebingen	Website GitHub Paper
MSGMP	2021		Multimodal Perception	MIT Sea Grant AUV Lab	Website Paper
Dasha River	2022		Semantic Segmentation	Shenzhen Polytechnic University	Paper Github
MaSTr1478	2022		Semantic Segmentation	University of Ljubljana	Paper Github
MU-SSiD	2022		Sea State Classification	Manzoor Umair Team	Dataset Paper
ROSEBUD	2022		Semantic Segmentation	Purdue University	Dataset Paper
MassMIND	2023		Semantic Segmentation Instance Segmentation	University of Massachusetts Lowell	Paper Github
LaRS	2023		Semantic Segmentation Panoptic Segmentation	University of Ljubljana	Website GitHub Paper
MariBoats	2023		Instance Segmentation	Harbin Engineering University	Paper Github
Pohang Canal Dataset	2023		SLAM	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology	Website Paper Github
SPSCD	2023		Object Detection Classification	University of Split	Website Paper
WaterScenes	2023	TITS	Object Detection Instance Segmentation Semantic Segmentation Free-Space Segmentation Waterline Segmentation Panoptic Perception	University of Liverpool	Website GitHub Paper
MVDD13	2024		Object Detection	Dalian Maritime University	GitHub Paper
OASIs	2024		Semantic Segmentation	Seadronix	Website Paper
GLSD	2025		Object Detection	Wuhan University	Paper Github
IWHR_AI_Lable_Floater_V1	2025		Object Detection	China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research	Dataset Paper
PoLaRIS	2025		Object Detection Object Tracking	Seoul National University	Website Paper Github
SeePerSea	2025		Object Detection	Dartmouth College	Website Paper Github
MULTIAQUA	2025		Semantic Segmentation	University of Ljubljana	Website Paper
MVTD	2025		Object Tracking	Khalifa University	Dataset Paper Github
USVTrack	2025	IROS	Object Detection Object Tracking	University of Liverpool	Website Paper Github
SeaClips	2026		Object Detection	SEA.AI	Dataset Paper
WUTDet	2026		Object Detection	Wuhan University of Technology	Paper Github

Uni-Modal Perception

Detection

• 2019 - Object Detection in a Maritime Environment: Performance Evaluation of Background Subtraction Methods [Dataset: SMD] TITS [Paper]
• 2020 - Are Object Detection Assessment Criteria Ready for Maritime Computer Vision? [Dataset: SMD] TITS [Paper]
• 2023 - An Automated Method for the Creation of Oriented Bounding Boxes in Remote Sensing Ship Detection Datasets [Dataset: HRSC2016 ShipRSImageNet] WACV Workshop [Paper]
• 2023 - A Novel Framework To Evaluate and Train Object Detection Models for Real-Time Victims Search and Rescue at Sea With Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems Using High-Fidelity Dynamic Marine Simulation Environment [Dataset: SeaDronesSee MS COCO] WACV Workshop [Paper]
• 2024 - MDD-ShipNet: Math-Data Integrated Defogging for Fog-Occlusion Ship Detection [Dataset: CH MVDD13] TITS [Paper]
• 2024 - AodeMar: Attention-Aware Occlusion Detection of Vessels for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships [Dataset: MVDD13] TITS [Paper]
• 2024 - [PWP] Panoptic Water Surface Visual Perception for USVs Using Monocular Camera Sensor [Dataset: FloW WSODD SMD MODD2 USVInland MaSTr1325] IEEE Sensors [Paper]
• 2025 - PointSR: Self-Regularized Point Supervision for Drone-View Object Detection [Dataset: DroneVehicle VisDrone UAVDT] CVPR [Paper]
• 2025 - [RemDet] Rethinking Efficient Model Design for UAV Object Detection [Dataset: PU1K KITTI] AAAI [Paper]
• 2025 - Vessel Registration Number Detection and Recognition System [Dataset: SPSCD Šibennik Bay CCTV Static Camera Dataset] WACV Workshop [Paper] [GitHub]
• 2025 - Marine Event Vision: Harnessing Event Cameras For Robust Object Detection In Marine Scenarios WACV Workshop [Paper]
• 2026 - Optimization-Diverse Transformer Adaptation with Gated Heterogeneous Fusion for Robust Thermal Object Detection [Dataset: Maritime Collision Avoidance Dataset] CVPR Workshop [Paper]

Small Object Detection

• 2023 - [M2S] A novel Multi to Single Module for small object detection [Dataset: VisDrone2021-DET SeaDronesSeeV2] [Paper]
• 2023 - [CZ detector] Cascaded Zoom-In Detector for High Resolution Aerial Images [Dataset: VisDrone DOTA] CVPRW [Paper]
• 2023 - [CFINet] Small Object Detection via Coarse-to-fine Proposal Generation and Imitation Learning [Dataset: SODA-D SODA-A] ICCV [Paper] [GitHub]
• 2023 - [DCFL] Dynamic Coarse-to-Fine Learning for Oriented Tiny Object Detection [Dataset: DOTA-v1.0 DOTA-v1.5 DOTA-v2.0 DIOR-R VisDrone COCO] CVPR [Paper] [GitHub]
• 2023 - YOLOv7-Sea: Object Detection of Maritime UAV Images Based on Improved YOLOv7 [Dataset: SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2] WACV Workshop [Paper]
• 2024 - [DQ-DETR] DETR with Dynamic Query for Tiny Object Detection [Dataset: AI-TOD-V2 VisDrone COCO] ECCV [Paper] [GitHub]
• 2024 - [SCDNet] Dense Tiny Object Detection: A Scene Context Guided Approach and A Unified Benchmark [Dataset: DTOD] TGRS [Paper]
• 2024 - [DFR-Det] Learning 1-Bit Tiny Object Detector with Discriminative Feature Refinement [Dataset: AI-TOD DOTA-v2.0 TinyPerson] ICML [Paper]
• 2024 - [ORFENet] Tiny Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on Object Reconstruction and Multiple Receptive Field Adaptive Feature Enhancement [Dataset: AI-TODv2 LEVIR-Ship] TGRS [Paper] [GitHub]
• 2024 - [SR-TOD] Visible and Clear: Finding Tiny Objects in Difference Map [Dataset: VisDrone2019 AI-TOD] ECCV [Paper] [GitHub]
• 2025 - Feature Information Driven Position Gaussian Distribution Estimation for Tiny Object Detection [Dataset: VisDrone2019 AI-TOD AI-TODv2] CVPR [Paper]
• 2025 - HS-FPN: High Frequency and Spatial Perception FPN for Tiny Object Detection [Dataset: AI-TOD] AAAI [Paper]
• 2025 - SET: Spectral Enhancement for Tiny Object Detection [Dataset: AI-TOD VisDrone2019 DOTA-v2.0 COCO 2017 TinyPerson SeaPerson] CVPR [Paper]
• 2025 - [Point Teacher] Tiny Object Detection with Single Point Supervision [Dataset: AI-TOD-v2 SODA-A TinyPerson DOTA-v2] ISPRS JPRS [Paper] [GitHub]
• 2025 - [UGS] Uncertainty-Aware Gradient Stabilization for Small Object Detection [Dataset: VisDrone SODA-A COCO 2017 PASCAL VOC] ICCV [Paper]
• 2025 - FalconEye: Efficient Centroid-Based Object Detection for Maritime High Altitude UAV Images on Embedded Devices [Dataset: SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2] WACV Workshop [Paper] [GitHub]
• 2026 - BDNet: Bio-Inspired Dual-Backbone Small Object Detection Network [Dataset: VisDrone2019 NWPU VHR-10 AI-TODv2] CVPR [Paper]
• 2026 - Thermal-Adapted RF-DETR with Skyline-Guided Filtering and Cross-Scale Fusion for Maritime Thermal Object Detection [Dataset: Maritime Collision Avoidance Dataset] CVPR Workshop [Paper]
• 2026 - [Enhanced YOLOv8] Improving small object detection in open water maritime monitoring under low-shot learning [Dataset: SeaDronesSee] Ocean Engineering [Paper]

Segmentation

• 2018 - Stereo obstacle detection for unmanned surface vehicles by IMU-assisted semantic segmentation [Dataset: MODD2] [Paper]
• 2021 - ShorelineNet: An Efficient Deep Learning Approach for Shoreline Semantic Segmentation for Unmanned Surface Vehicles [Dataset: MODD2] IROS [Paper]
• 2026 - LEMMA: Laplacian pyramids for Efficient Marine SeMAntic Segmentation [Dataset: MaSTr1325 Oil Spill Drone Dataset] CVPR Workshop [Paper]
• 2026 - Improving Thing Segmentation for USV Panoptic Scene Understanding with Detector-Guided Class-Specific Refinement [Dataset: LaRS] CVPR Workshop [Paper]

Tracking

• 2021 - [RoDAN] A Robust Deep Affinity Network for Multiple Ship Tracking [Dataset: SMD] TIM [Paper]
• 2023 - Stable Yaw Estimation of Boats from the Viewpoint of UAVs and USVs [Dataset: PASCAL3D+ SeaDronesSee-3D BOArienT] ECMR [Paper]
• 2023 - Memory Maps for Video Object Detection and Tracking on UAVs [Dataset: SeaDronesSee-MOT OpenWater] IROS [Paper]
• 2023 - ReIDTracker Sea: the technical report of BoaTrack and SeaDronesSee-MOT challenge at MaCVi [Dataset: SeaDronesSee-MOT LaRS] WACV Workshop [Paper]
• 2023 - DLR-BoaTrack: Improving YOLOv8 with Scattering Transform and Attention for Maritime Awareness [Dataset: ShipSG] ISPA [Paper]
• 2024 - Active Vision-Based Finite-Time Trajectory-Tracking Control of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle Without Direct Position Measurements TITS [Paper]
• 2024 - [MG-MOT] Sea You Later: Metadata-Guided Long-Term Re-Identification for UAV-Based Multi-Object Tracking [Dataset: SeaDronesSee-MOT] WACV Workshop [Paper]

Mapping

• 2024 - [FVMNet] Real-Time Volumetric Perception for Unmanned Surface Vehicles Through Fusion of Radar and Camera [Task: Segmentation Dataset: USVInland] TIM [Paper]

Trajectory Prediction

• 2026 - [DI-MTP] Unified Multimodal Vessel Trajectory Prediction With Explainable Navigation Intention TITS [Paper] [GitHub]

Change Detection

• 2024 - SeaDSC: A Video-Based Unsupervised Method for Dynamic Scene Change Detection in Unmanned Surface Vehicles [Dataset: RoboWhaler] WACV Workshop [Paper]

Depth Estimation

• 2026 - Monocular Metric Distance Estimation in Maritime Scenes via Reference-Based Scale Recovery CVPR Workshop [Paper]

Diffusion

• 2023 - SafeSea: Synthetic Data Generation for Adverse & Low Probability Maritime Conditions [Dataset: SeaDronesSee MU-SSiD Boat-MNIST SafeSea] WACV Workshop[Paper] [Code]

Image Enhancement

• 2023 - AiOENet: All-in-One Low-Visibility Enhancement to Improve Visual Perception for Intelligent Marine Vehicles Under Severe Weather Conditions [Dataset: RESIDE-OTS LOL Rain100L CSD SeaShips SMD] TIV[Paper] [Code]

Multi-Modal Perception

Radar-Camera

• 2023 - Achelous: A Fast Unified Water-surface Panoptic Perception Framework based on Fusion of Monocular Camera and 4D mmWave Radar [Task: Detection Segmentation Dataset: WaterScenes] ITSC [Paper] [GitHub]
• 2024 - RaViDeep: Target Detection Based on Deep Fusion of Radar and Vision in Berthing Scenarios [Task: Detection] TIV [Paper]
• 2024 - [RCFNet] Small Object Detection on the Water Surface Based on Radar and Camera Fusion [Task: Detection Dataset: FloW] ICASSP [Paper]
• 2024 - [FVMNet] Real-Time Volumetric Perception for Unmanned Surface Vehicles Through Fusion of Radar and Camera [Task: Segmentation Dataset: USVInland] TIM [Paper]
• 2025 - [RCBDet] Space Grafted Velocity 3D Boat Detection for Unmanned Surface Vessel via mmWave Radar and Camera [Task: Detection Dataset: VoD] IEEE Sensors [Paper]

AIS-Camera

• 2023 - [DeepSORVF] Asynchronous Trajectory Matching-Based Multimodal Maritime Data Fusion for Vessel Traffic Surveillance in Inland Waterways [Task: Detection Tracking] TITS [Paper]
• 2023 - Improving maritime traffic surveillance in inland waterways using the robust fusion of AIS and visual data [Task: Detection Tracking] Ocean Engineering [Paper]
• 2024 - Image and AIS Data Fusion Technique for Maritime Computer Vision Applications [Task: Association] WACV Workshop [Paper] [GitHub]

Chart-Camera

• 2026 - Skyline-Aware ROI-Calibrated Buoy Association for Vision-to-Chart Data Association [Task: Association Dataset: Vision-to-Chart Data Association Challenge Dataset] CVPR Workshop [Paper]
• 2026 - Real-Time Fusion of Visual and Chart Data for Enhanced Maritime Vision [Task: Association Detection] CVPR Workshop [Paper] [GitHub]

Marine Radar-Camera

• 2025 - WS-DETR: Robust Water Surface Object Detection through Vision-Radar Fusion with Detection Transformer [Task: Detection Dataset: WaterScenes] SMC [Paper]
• 2026 - Real-Time Radar--Vision Association via Monocular Distance Estimation [Task: Association Dataset: MIT Sea Grant Marine Perception Dataset] CVPR Workshop [Paper]
• 2026 - PhysFusion: A Transformer-based Dual-Stream Radar and Vision Fusion Framework for Open Water Surface Object Detection [Task: Detection Dataset: WaterScenes FloW] arXiv [Paper]
• 2026 - CalibFusion: Transformer-Based Differentiable Calibration for Radar-Camera Fusion Detection in Water-Surface Environments [Task: Detection Calibration Dataset: WaterScenes FloW] arXiv [Paper]

LiDAR-Camera

RGB-IR

• 2025 - Visible-Thermal Tiny Object Detection: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines [Task: Detection Dataset: RGBT-Tiny] TPAMI [Paper]

• 2026 - DyFCLT: Dynamic Frequency-Decoupled Cross-Modal Learning Transformer for Multimodal Tiny Object Detection [Task: Detection Dataset: RGBT-Tiny RGBTDronePerson FLIR] CVPR [Paper]