Passive target tracking of marine traffic ships using onboard monocular camera for unmanned surface vessel

Enhancing the performance of passive target tracking and trajectory estimation of marine traffic ships is focused using a monocular camera mounted on an unmanned surface vessel. To accurately estimate the trajectory of a target traffic ship, the relative bearing and range information between the observing ship and the target ship is required. Monocular vision provides bearing information with reasonable accuracy but with no explicit range information. The relative range information can be extracted from the bearing changes induced by the relative ship motion in the framework of bearings‐only tracking (BOT). BOT can be effective in crossing situations with large bearing angle changes. However, it often fails in head‐on or overtaking situations due to small bearing angle changes and the resulting low observability of the tracking filter. To deal with the lack of observability, the vertical pixel distance between the horizon and the target ship in the image is used, which improves the overall target tracking performance. The feasibility and performance of the proposed tracking approach were validated through field experiments at sea.