YOLOv7 Model for Small Object Handling in Maritime Images

Around the world many maritime surveillance cameras exist whose functionality could be expanded with computer vision-based object detection in order to monitor traffic and provide automated statistics or to increase safety. To this aim, we train two versions of the Yolov7 object detection model on a suitable custom dataset with four object categories and evaluate their detection performance. In order to handle small objects such as buoys or objects that appear visually small in the frame such as distant boats, we examine two different configurations of input to the model.