A Ship Detection Method Based on LiDAR Data from Inland Waterways

The construction of smart waterways is a crucial element in the high-quality development of the transportation industry. To achieve this goal, the inland water transportation system must perform accurate, real-time, and efficient monitoring of ships in transit. However, most research on inland ship monitoring relies on visual sensors, which lack depth information and are easily affected by lighting and environmental conditions. To address this issue, we propose a ship detection method based on LiDAR data for inland waterways. This method employs an improved clustering strategy to process point cloud data from specific laser beams, achieving data matching and ship detection through interframe cluster association. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves high detection accuracy and superior time performance.