ViV-ReID: Bidirectional Structural-Aware Spatial–Temporal Graph Networks on Large-Scale Video-Based Vessel Re-Identification Dataset

Vessel re-identification (ReID) serves as a foundational task for intelligent maritime transportation systems. To enhance maritime surveillance capabilities, this study investigates video-based vessel ReID, a critical yet underexplored task in intelligent transportation systems. The lack of relevant datasets has limited the progress of Video-based vessel ReID research work. We established ViV-ReID, the first publicly available large-scale video-based vessel ReID dataset, comprising 480 vessel identities captured from 20 cross-port camera views (7,165 tracklets and 1.14 million frames), establishing a benchmark for advancing vessel ReID from image to video processing. Videos offer significantly richer information than single-frame images. The dynamic nature of video often leads to fragmented spatio-temporal features causing disrupted contextual understanding, and to address this problem, we further propose a Bidirectional Structural-Aware Spatial-Temporal Graph Network (Bi-SSTN) that explicitly aligns spatio-temporal features using vessel structural priors. Extensive experiments on the ViV-ReID dataset demonstrate that image-based ReID methods often show suboptimal performance when applied to video data. Meanwhile, it is crucial to validate the effectiveness of spatio-temporal information and establish performance benchmarks for different methods. The Bidirectional Structural-Aware Spatial-Temporal Graph Network (Bi-SSTN) significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ViV-ReID, confirming its efficacy in modeling vessel-specific spatio-temporal patterns. Project web page: https://vsislab.github.io/ViV_ReID/.