A Novel Method of Automatic Ship Perception Based on the Information of PTZ Camera and Beidou Device in Wide Waters

Traditional shore-based vision surveillance devices for wide waters can only track ships in a small area because current vision surveillance devices for wide waters usually use fixed-view cameras for sensing. In order to obtain a wider view, this paper proposes a vision-based ship sensing method that combines PTZ cameras with BeiDou devices to track ships accurately and robustly in wide waters. First, an active monitoring method based on PTZ camera is constructed to convert the pan and tilt angle of PTZ camera to the UTM coordinate of BeiDou device. In addition, to improve the tracking accuracy and robustness, a Kalman Filter-based ship tracking method is proposed to fuse the received BeiDou information with the positioning information of the PTZ camera to obtain more accurate ship position information. The proposed method and system have been validated in practical experiments. The results show that the system can accurately estimate the position of the ship at the next moment, while being able to actively track the automatic ship in a wide range of waters.