Frame-to-Panorama Localization and Context-Aware Sampling for Scene-Specific Ship Detection in a Smart Marina Testbed

Abstract

Smart maritime infrastructures provide continuous access to heterogeneous sensing streams, enabling repeated experimentation, digital-twin development, and AI-based maritime services. However, sensing hardware alone is not sufficient for scene-specific model development: historical video streams must also be spatially indexed, contextualized, and reduced to informative subsets for annotation. This paper presents a frame-to-panorama localization and context-aware sampling pipeline for ship detection in historical PTZ maritime video lacking reliable pan, tilt, and zoom metadata. The main contribution is an end-to-end data-curation approach that recovers camera-view information from historical PTZ video and combines it with environmental context and visual diversity to construct compact, scene-specific training sets. Specifically, frames are localized on a reference panorama using SuperPoint and LightGlue, enriched with weather and solar-state metadata, and selected through diversity sampling to preserve variation across camera view and environmental conditions. A second context-aware stage targets under-represented distant-vessel cases near the horizon using tile-level visual embeddings and Gaussian Mixture Model clustering. Applied within the CMMI MDigi-I Smart Marina testbed, the proposed pipeline reduces 40,718 candidate frames to 220 images for annotation, corresponding to a 99.5% reduction. A YOLO26-m detector fine-tuned on this subset achieves a mean AP50 of 94.78% $\pm$ 0.51% and a mean AP50-95 of 75.10% $\pm$ 1.73% under sequence-grouped five-fold cross-validation. These results demonstrate that highly redundant infrastructure video streams can be transformed into compact, spatially and contextually diverse training sets for scene-specific detector adaptation while substantially reducing annotation effort.