Sea Situational Awareness (SeaSAw) Dataset

Vessels move 90% of international cargo by volume, with the marine economy contributing to 5.1% of global GDP. As one of the oldest industries, the marine industry has yet to embrace innovations in modern technology to safeguard the blue economy. Situational awareness from intelligent vessel systems can enable enhanced safety and decision-making for mariners. As the foundation for these intelligent systems, advanced perception technology requires sufficient real-world operational data to leverage recent AI technologies. In this work, we introduce the Sea Situational Awareness (SeaSAw) dataset - a novel dataset that is comprised of 1.9 million images with 14.6 million objects associated with 20.4 million attributes from 12 object classes, making it the largest maritime dataset for object detection, fine-grained classification and tracking. Furthermore, this dataset consists of 9 sources in combination with various RGB cam-eras, mounted on different moving vessels, operating in different geographic locations globally, having variations in scenario, weather and illumination conditions. This data collection took place across 4 years with rigorous efforts on data selection, annotation, management and analysis to enhance the marine perception technology.