SafeSea: Synthetic Data Generation for Adverse & Low Probability Maritime Conditions

Martin Tran, Jordan Shipard, Hermawan Mulyono, Arnold Wiliem, Clinton Fookes; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops, 2024, pp. 821-829

High-quality training data is essential for enhancing the robustness of object detection models. Within the maritime domain, obtaining a diverse real image dataset is particularly challenging due to the difficulty of capturing sea images with the presence of maritime objects, especially in stormy conditions. These challenges arise due to resource limitations, in addition to the unpredictable appearance of maritime objects. Nevertheless, acquiring data from stormy conditions is essential for training effective maritime detection models, particularly for search and rescue, where real-world conditions can be unpredictable. In this work, we introduce SafeSea, which a stepping stone towards transforming actual sea images with various Sea State backgrounds while retaining maritime objects. Compared to existing generative methods such as Stable Diffusion Inpainting, this approach reduces the time and effort required to create synthetic datasets for training maritime object detection models. The proposed method uses two automated filters to only pass generated images that meet the criteria. In particular, these filters will first classify the sea condition according to its Sea State level and then it will check whether the objects from the input image are still preserved. This method enabled the creation of the SafeSea dataset, offering diverse weather condition backgrounds to supplement the training of maritime models. Lastly, we observed that a maritime object detection model faced challenges in detecting objects in stormy sea backgrounds, emphasizing the impact of weather conditions on detection accuracy.