Lightweight Underwater Acoustic Vessel Classification for Embedded Deployment

We propose a Raspberry Pi-based underwater vessel classification system for edge deployment under limited connectivity, bandwidth and power in offshore acoustic surveillance. Using ShipsEar, we compare six classifiers on a Raspberry Pi 5 through a complete audio-to-prediction pipeline. We assess classification performance, processing latency, CPU utilisation, memory consumption and monitored power. Supporting experiments examine acoustic feature selection, statistical pooling and Transformer patch configurations. The two-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) achieved a mean macro-F1 of {(99.14 {} 0.32)%} across five random seeds. The radial basis function support vector machine (RBF-SVM) achieved 98.83%, with a median end-to-end latency of 28.109~ms compared with 120.655~ms for the CNN. This favourable trade-off motivated RBF-SVM deployment on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It maintained the same classification performance with a median end-to-end latency of 349.09~ms and a sustained throughput of 2.962 classifications/s, or 14.8 times the rate required for consecutive five-second audio segments.