CANSURF: An ASV-View Can Dataset and Benchmark for Detection and Tracking of Surface-Level Debris

Abstract

Surface-level marine debris remains a practical bottleneck for autonomous clean-up, where small, reflective targets (e.g., aluminum cans) must be detected at distance under glare, ripples, and partial submersion. This paper presents, an ASV vision system and a new surface-can dataset. The dataset comprises ~7.3k raw images extracted from videos and annotated with bounding boxes, expanded via ten augmentation types to ~57k training/validation images spanning diverse lighting and water states. A family of detector and detector-tracker pipelines tailored to surface operations were benchmarked. Training YOLOv11 on CANSURF boosts performance 12x over generic datasets, highlighting the dataset's value. Experiments show that YOLOv11+ByteTrack yields the most stable tracks (fewer identity switches) and stronger multi-object accuracy under, while YOLOv11+SAHI increases recall on far-field cans at the cost of lower precision in full-context inputs. Given the mission profile, single-can pickup with approach and grab, YOLOv11 + SAHI proves better for detecting the maximum number of cans. No prior open dataset targets aluminum cans on water from a surface-level viewpoint; this dataset fills this gap and supports reproducible evaluation.

Published in the 2025 8th International Conference on Signal Processing and Information Security (ICSPIS). Published and available to view on IEEE Xplore