A Ship Ranging and Positioning System Based on Binocular Vision Technology

Abstract

Relative ranging and positioning is the basis to ensure the navigation safety of ships, and it has a broad application prospect in various maritime activities, especially in the aspects of docking and undocking, sailing in crowded areas, towing, convoy sailing, and warship replenishment, etc. In order to improve the autonomy and automation of ship ranging and positioning and reduce the cost, a novel type of ship ranging and positioning system based on binocular vision technology is proposed. The proposed system includes seven modules, i.e. video information acquisition module, ship attitude acquisition module, camera parameter calibration module, target recognition and segmentation module, image matching module, ranging and positioning module, and information display module. After acquiring the target image sequences by using two cameras, the proposed system identifies and segments maritime targets quickly by using Canny algorithm in the artificial interactive mode, realizes reduced-space search by using epipolar constraint method, achieve fast target features matching to obtain the vision disparity of the feature points by using the SURF algorithm, and calculates the distance of the target according to the binocular vision ranging principle, so as to realize interactive visual ranging and positioning. The proposed system has the advantages of low cost, simple structure and convenient operation. It can realize relative ranging and positioning with only one computer and two cameras. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed system, with fast running speed and high accuracy, can satisfy the relative ranging and positioning needs of ships.