A vision-based system for robotic inspection of marine vessels

This paper presents a novel intelligent system forthe automatic visual inspection of vessels consisting of three processing levels: (a) data acquisition: images are collectedusing a magnetic climbing robot equipped with a low-costmonocular camera for hull inspection; (b) feature extraction: all the images are characterized by 12 features consisting ofcolor moments in each channel of the HSV space; (c) classification: a novel tool, based on an ensemble of classifiers, is proposed to classify sub-images as rust or non-rust. This paper provides a helpful roadmap to guide future research on the detection of rusting of metals using image processing.