ON PROBABILITY OF ESTIMATION OF VESSEL'S USEFUL INFORMATION USING RADAR ECHOES

When many vessels are encountered at sea, it is very useful that the information on these vessels, for example course, speed, size of vessel, destination and intention of manoeuvring can be obtained instantly. Some of this information is provided by navigational aids such as automatic radar plotting. It takes at least half a minute to observe the vessel and to calculate the vessel's course and speed, so the value is at least half a minute old. The authors made an attempt to estimate gross tonnage, shape and aspect angle of the vessel by simple image processing of radar echoes. Ultra high speed analogue to digital converted echo images of radar gives special information in a new form. The experiments were carried out using the X-band radar with a narrow beam width antenna. The aspect angles of the vessel could be estimated with relative certainty.