A first step towards automated image-based container inspections

Purpose: The visual inspection of freight containers at depots is an essential part of the maintenance and repair process, which ensures that containers are in a suitable condition for loading and safe transport. Currently this process is done manually, which has certain disadvantages and insufficient availability of skilled inspectors can cause delays and poor predictability. Methodology: This paper addresses the question whether instead computer vision algorithms can be used to automate damage recognition based on digital images. The main idea is to apply state-of-the-art deep learning methods for object recognition on a large dataset of annotated images captured during the inspection process in order to train a computer vision model and evaluate its performance. Findings: The focus is on a first use case where an algorithm is trained to predict the view of a container shown on a given picture. Results show robust performance for this task. Originality: The originality of this work arises from the fact that computer vision for damage recognition has not been attempted on a similar dataset of images captured in the context of freight container inspections.