Augmentation of onboard camera data with ship manoeuvrability for tactical navigation support in ice

Shipping in Canadian Arctic waters involves significant risks, primarily due to potential ice interactions. To address these challenges, various support tools have been developed to enhance safe navigation in ice-prone regions. These include POLARIS, a system which evaluates vessel suitability for specific ice conditions, and onboard cameras, which act as sensors to capture and monitor ice conditions around a vessel. This study examines the effectiveness of these two decision support tools, emphasizing the need to account for operational parameters such as vessel speed and physical characteristics like vessel length when assessing a ship's ability to navigate safely through ice. Image processing techniques, including projective transformation or homography, are applied to convert onboard camera data into a top-down view, enabling augmentation of ship manoeuvrability parameters, specifically the stopping distance and turning circle parameters. Image rescaling is further employed to achieve a true-scale representation of distances within the field of view. Two sample vessel scenarios are analyzed to evaluate their manoeuvrability in a test case involving a 50m diameter ice hazard at 175m directly ahead of the vessel. The results demonstrate the critical role of vessel speed in stopping distance. The results also show the limitations of using onboard cameras for tactical navigational support, as well as highlighting the limits that POLARIS has in terms of accounting for differences in vessels within the same ice class but with different capabilities.