Obstacles in the Water

Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?
(Mark chapter 8 verse 18, King James Version)

Taking pictures or video with a camera is one thing, but interpreting meaning from those images is quite another. I attempted to read some literature on image recognition and obstacle detection, and got a few rough ideas from it, but nothing that really jumped out as a straightforward solution to the problem of how to detect obstacles floating around in the water, within the camera's field of view.

Since last week's approach of looking for color transitions to find the coast / horizon line seemed to work pretty well, I tried out a similar method of looking for large-ish deviations in color properties of 10x10 blocks of pixels to see whether or not a particular block of pixels might correspond to an object floating in the water. So far I have not tested out the approach on a wide variety of images, but I'm hopeful that by refining the algorithm it might prove to be useful. Below is a screenshot taken from a Windows program that I have been working on for collecting and viewing image statistics and testing out various object detection algorithms. The 10x10 blocks that corresponded to a floating object (i.e. my kayak) appear as small white squares:

We are going on a family vacation to Toronto this coming week, and although I am not permitted to bring AMOS with us in the van, I'm hopeful that I will still have some time to work on various object detection schemes whenever I get a bit of a break from the driving.