Tracking a Vessel by Combining Video and AIS Reports

Abstract

Video surveillance systems have been widely deployed in harbors or along coastlines. These systems provide a continuous surveillance of the transportation in a certain area, however, it¿s difficult for the users to position a specific vessel and keep tracking it on these systems in an automatic way. To satisfy this requirement, this paper put forward a method of tracking a vessel by combining video and ship-borne AIS reports, which can provide continual positions of the vessel. The vessel¿s current position is used to focus the camera on the vessel, and Kalman filtering model is applied to smooth the video images. Simulation results show the proposed method has a high tracking precision and a user-friendly characteristic. This research shall be helpful for tracking a specific vessel with video surveillance.