An Intelligent Visual Sensing System for Unmanned Surface Vessels

Optical perception is essential for USVs to accomplish its diverse range of missions while working autonomously on the surface of water. USVs should have the abilities of automatically seeing and avoiding obstacles as well as recognizing navigation lights and day shapes in other vessels. The current technologies lack the ability to satisfactorily capture images and process the digital data and fail to meet performance requirements in terms of stabilization, coverage, range and obstacle detection. In this Phase II UtopiaCompression Corp. (UC) and our collaborators will build a prototype of an innovative Intelligent Visual Sensing (IVS) system to support autonomous navigation and situational awareness of Unmanned Surface Vessels. Using a novel true omni-directional camera, the IVS system will provide a real-time video stream of panoramic images covering the full 360o cylindrical field-of-view (FOV) around the vessel with high image resolution and high image fidelity, free from parallax, distortion and artifacts. The IVS system will have intelligent video analytic capabilities of automatic detection, tracking and classification of surface contacts that enhance vessel situational awareness and support autonomous navigation It will thus free the operator from having to constantly watch and control pan-tilt-zoom cameras, which are extremely ineffective and cause fatigue.