Multi-scale feature fusion keypoint detection network for ship draft line localization

In the maritime industry, accurately detecting a ship's draft line is crucial for ensuring transaction fairness and navigational safety. Existing deep learning-based methods for draft line detection primarily use segmentation techniques to segment the entire body of water before determining the waterline. These approaches incur high computational costs and often face challenges under varying environmental conditions, such as lighting changes and different hull colors. To address these issues, we propose multi-scale feature fusion keypoint detection network (MFFKD) for precise and efficient ship draft line detection. Our network integrates four stages of Dilated Residual-Channel Recalibration Module (DR-CRM) blocks to extract multi-scale features. Meanwhile, the Feature Enhancement Extraction Modules (FEEM) are employed to enhance these extracted features, and the Multi-scale Feature Weighted Integration (MFWI) module efficiently fuses the enhanced multi-scale features. Furthermore, a task head for keypoint prediction is designed to ensure accurate localization of keypoints. By integrating the predicted keypoint data with mark information detected by the character recognition head through a mathematical model, we achieve precise predictions of waterline readings. To enhance the model's adaptability to various environmental conditions, we adopt a dual-phase training strategy: an initial pre-training phase for learning general ship features and waterline characteristics, followed by a fine-tuning phase using data from diverse scenes. Extensive experimental results show that our method surpasses the baseline models in waterline detection accuracy. In terms of model execution speed, our method exceeds the advanced segmentation-based approaches. These demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating keypoint detection with dual-phase training in ship waterline detection.