A visual sensing platform for creating a smarter multi-modal marine monitoring network

Demands from various scientific and management communities along with legislative requirements at national and international levels have led to a need for innovative research into large-scale, low-cost, reliable monitoring of our marine and freshwater environments. In this paper we demonstrate the benefits of a multi-modal approach to monitoring and how an in-situ sensor network can be enhanced with the use of contextual image data. We provide an outline of the deployment of a visual sensing system at a busy port and the need for monitoring shipping traffic at the port. Subsequently we present an approach for detecting ships in a challenging image dataset and discuss how this can help to create an intelligent marine monitoring network.