A reliable unmanned aerial vehicle multi-ship tracking method

As the global economy expands, waterway transportation has become increasingly crucial to the logistics sector. This growth presents both significant challenges and opportunities for enhancing the accuracy of ship detection and tracking through the application of artificial intelligence. This article introduces a multi-object tracking system designed for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), utilizing the YOLOv7 and Deep SORT algorithms for detection and tracking, respectively. To mitigate the impact of limited ship data on model training, transfer learning techniques are employed to enhance the YOLOv7 model’s performance. Additionally, the integration of the SimAM attention mechanism within the YOLOv7 detection model improves feature representation by emphasizing salient features and suppressing irrelevant information, thereby boosting detection capabilities. The inclusion of the partial convolution (PConv) module further enhances the detection of irregularly shaped or partially occluded targets. This module minimizes the influence of invalid regions during feature extraction, resulting in more accurate and stable features. The implementation of PConv not only improves detection accuracy and speed but also reduces the model’s parameters and computational demands, making it more suitable for deployment on computationally constrained UAV platforms. Furthermore, to address issues of false negatives during clustering in the Deep SORT algorithm, the IOU metric is replaced with the DIOU metric at the matching stage. This adjustment enhances the matching of unlinked tracks with detected objects, reducing missed detections and improving the accuracy of target tracking. Compared to the original YOLOv7+Deep SORT model, which achieved an MOTA of 58.4% and an MOTP of 78.9%, the enhanced system achieves a MOTA of 65.3% and a MOTP of 81.9%. This represents an increase of 6.9% in MOTA and 3.0% in MOTP. After extensive evaluation and analysis, the system has demonstrated robust performance in ship monitoring scenarios, offering valuable insights and serving as a critical reference for ship surveillance tasks.