Real-time Verification of Container Seal Integrity using Deep Learning
Sotiris Vasileiadis, Sijun Yu, Kyriacos Orphanides, Alessandro Cassera, Michalis Michaelides, Herodotos Herodotou
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2026F0497
Citation: Sotiris Vasileiadis, Sijun Yu, Kyriacos Orphanides, Alessandro Cassera, Michalis Michaelides, Herodotos Herodotou (2026). Real-time Verification of Container Seal Integrity using Deep Learning. In M. Bolanowski, M. Ganzha, M. Grzegorowski, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki, A. Paszkiewicz, D. Ślęzak (eds), Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems (FedCSIS). ACSIS, Vol. 47, pages 155–164.
Abstract. Container seal integrity verification represents a critical yet underexplored challenge in maritime logistics security. Early theft detection is critical for minimizing operational delays, reducing costs, and ensuring safety in global maritime logistics. This work presents a deep learning-based methodology for real-time detection of container seals during crane unloading operations at container terminals. We develop and deploy two specialized YOLOv12-based object detection models: one for identifying container doors in motion and another for detecting in-place security fixtures, such as standard locks, container seals, and customs seals. Our models are trained and evaluated on a real-world dataset curated from video feeds captured at the EUROGATE Container Terminal in Limassol Port, Cyprus. The system is designed for robust performance under realistic terminal conditions, including variable lighting and motion. Our models achieve high detection accuracy across variable weather conditions, with mAP50 scores of 0.95 for container door detection and 0.74 for seal detection, substantially outperforming existing benchmarks. These findings underscore the practical potential of our methodology for enhancing the efficiency and security of automated maritime logistics.
References
- S. Aslam, M. P. Michaelides, and H. Herodotou, “A Survey on Computational Intelligence Approaches for Intelligent Marine Terminal Operations,” IET Intelligent Transport Systems, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 755–793, 2024. https://dx.doi.org/10.1049/itr2.12469
- Universal Containers, “13 Facts About Shipping Containers,” https://universal-containers.com/news/13-facts-about-shipping-containers/, 2024, last accessed: April 15, 2026.
- H. Wang, Q. Liu, and G. Zhang, “Container Damage Detection Algorithm Based on Fast-Solo,” in Chinese Intelligent Systems Conference. Springer, 2022. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6226-4 13 pp. 119–131.
- S. Aslam, H. Herodotou, E. Garro, Á. Martı́nez-Romero, M. A. Burgos, A. Cassera, G. Papas, P. Dias, and M. P. Michaelides, “IoT for the Maritime Industry: Challenges and Emerging Applications,” in 18th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems (FedCSIS). IEEE, 2023. https://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2023F3625 pp. 855–858.
- S. Jakovlev, T. Eglynas, V. Jankunas, M. Jusis, and M. Voznak, “Analysis of Damage to Shipping Container Sides during Port Handling Operations,” Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, vol. 13, no. 5, p. 982, 2025. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jmse13050982
- E. Grey, “Cargo Theft: A Billion Dollar Problem in Shipping,” https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cargo-theft-billion-dollar-problem-121530759. html, 2024, last accessed: April 15, 2026.
- Z. Bahrami, R. Zhang, R. Rayhana, and Z. Liu, “An HRCR-CNN Framework for Automated Security Seal Detection on the Shipping Container,” IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, vol. 70, pp. 1–13, 2021. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIM.2021.3117079
- P. Basaras, M. Antonopoulos, K. V. Katsaros, G. Kanellopoulos, S. Tsagalas, and A. J. Amditis, “5G Enabled Video Analytics for Detecting Container Seals in Port Operations,” in Proceedings of the 8th International Physical Internet Conference (IPIC), 2021. [Online]. Available: https://repository.gatech.edu/bitstreams/574f27f0-5e8a-4075-b13d-ef40836592a6/download
- S. Vasileiadis, S. Aslam, K. Orphanides, A. Cassera, E. G. Crevillen, A. Martinez-Romero, M. P. Michaelides, and H. Herodotou, “Real-time Container Tracking and Damage Detection at Seaports Using Deep Learning,” in 2025 20th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems (FedCSIS). IEEE, 2025. https://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2025F5518 pp. 277–285.
- A. R. Pathak, M. Pandey, and S. Rautaray, “Application of Deep Learning for Object Detection,” Procedia Computer Science, vol. 132, pp. 1706–1717, 2018. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2018.05.144
- X. Li, X. Huang, and Q. Liu, “Container Damage Identification Based on RP-FCN,” in 39th Chinese Control Conference (CCC). IEEE, 2020. https://dx.doi.org/10.23919/CCC50068.2020.9189392 pp. 7031–7034.
- Z. Wang, J. Gao, Q. Zeng, and Y. Sun, “Multitype Damage Detection of Container using CNN based on Transfer Learning,” Mathematical Problems in Engineering, vol. 2021, pp. 1–12, 2021. https://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2021/5395494
- B.-S. Jeng, Q.-Z. Wu, Y.-P. Chen, and W.-Y. Cheng, “Image-based Container Defects Detector,” Oct. 3 2006, US Patent 7,116,814.
- C. Tang, P. Chen, and Y. Li, “Automatic Damage-Detecting System for Port Container Gate Based on AI,” in Proceedings of the 2020 9th International Conference on Computing and Pattern Recognition, 2020. https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3436369.3436480 pp. 146–151.
- W. Shi, X. Zhang, Y. Wang, and Q. Zhang, “Edge Computing: State-of-the-art and Future Directions,” Journal of Computer Research and Development, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 69–89, 2019. https://dx.doi.org/10.7544/issn1000-1239.2019.20180760
- G. Delgado, A. Cortés, and E. Loyo, “Pipeline for Visual Container Inspection Application using Deep Learning,” in Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (IJCCI 2022). SCITEPRESS, 2022. https://dx.doi.org/10.5220/0011590900003332 pp. 404–411.
- Y. Tian, Q. Ye, and D. Doermann, “YOLOv12: Attention-centric Real-time Object Detectors,” arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12524, 2025.
- M. A. R. Alif and M. Hussain, “YOLOv12: A Breakdown of the Key Architectural Features,” arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14740, 2025.
- Tzutalin, “LabelImg,” https://github.com/HumanSignal/labelImg, 2022, last accessed: April 15, 2026.
- H. Lou, X. Duan, J. Guo, H. Liu, J. Gu, L. Bi, and H. Chen, “DC-YOLOv8: Small-size Object Detection Algorithm based on Camera Sensor,” Electronics, vol. 12, no. 10, p. 2323, 2023. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/electronics12102323
- Ultralytics, “Ultralytics - Revolutionizing the World of Vision AI,” https://www.ultralytics.com/, May 2024, last accessed: April 15, 2026.
- D. Reis, J. Kupec, J. Hong, and A. Daoudi, “Real-time Flying Object Detection with YOLOv8,” arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09972, 2023. https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.09972
- M. Sandler, A. Howard, M. Zhu, A. Zhmoginov, and L.-C. Chen, “MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2018. https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1801.04381 pp. 4510–4520.
- C. Szegedy, V. Vanhoucke, S. Ioffe, J. Shlens, and Z. Wojna, “Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2016. https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1512.00567 pp. 2818–2826.
- K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, “Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.90 pp. 770–778.