Scientific Research and Essays

  • Abbreviation: Sci. Res. Essays
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 1992-2248
  • DOI: 10.5897/SRE
  • Start Year: 2006
  • Published Articles: 2769

Full Length Research Paper

Detection and tracking of ships using a stereo vision system

  Gazi Kocak1,2*, Shigehiro Yamamoto1 and Takeshi Hashimoto3        
  1Graduate School of Maritime Sciences, Kobe University, Japan. 2Maritime Faculty, Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Tuzla, Istanbul, Turkey. 3Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, Japan.
Email: [email protected]

  •  Accepted: 12 February 2013
  •  Published: 28 February 2013

Abstract

 

Maritime transportation continues to maintain the largest volume in the transportation sector, and this is increasing day-by-day. This means there is an ever-increasing demand for safe navigation. In this study, we propose a stereo vision system for detecting and tracking ships as a tool for increasing navigational safety. Ships are detected from obtained images by using an edge detection algorithm that uses a moving average to find high-intensity gradients. The detected points are clustered and the 3D location of a detected ship is calculated from a stereo image pair. The detected ship is then tracked for several tens of seconds to obtain its course. The result of our experiment indicates that the proposed stereo vision system is useful as a tool for safe navigation.

 

Key words: Safety navigation, ship detection, tracking, computer vision, stereo vision.