A Millimeter-Wave Radar-Aided Vision Detection Method for Water Surface Small Object Detection

Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) have wide applications in marine inspection and monitoring, terrain mapping, and water surface cleaning. Accurate and robust environment perception ability is essential for achieving autonomy in USVs. Small object detection on water surfaces is an important environme...

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Main Authors: Jiannan Zhu, Yixin Yang, Yuwei Cheng
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-09-01
Series:Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/11/9/1794
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author Jiannan Zhu
Yixin Yang
Yuwei Cheng
author_facet Jiannan Zhu
Yixin Yang
Yuwei Cheng
author_sort Jiannan Zhu
collection DOAJ
description Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) have wide applications in marine inspection and monitoring, terrain mapping, and water surface cleaning. Accurate and robust environment perception ability is essential for achieving autonomy in USVs. Small object detection on water surfaces is an important environment perception task, typically achieved by visual detection using cameras. However, existing vision-based small object detection methods suffer from performance degradation in complex water surface environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar-aided vision detection method that enables automatic data association and fusion between mmWave radar point clouds and images. Through testing on real-world data, the proposed method demonstrates significant performance improvement over vision-based object detection methods without introducing more computational costs, making it suitable for real-time application on USVs. Furthermore, the image–radar data association model in the proposed method can serve as a plug-and-play module for other object detection methods.
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spelling doaj.art-79b5b79be84a47beaf6dc2cff5e828d52023-11-19T11:27:28ZengMDPI AGJournal of Marine Science and Engineering2077-13122023-09-01119179410.3390/jmse11091794A Millimeter-Wave Radar-Aided Vision Detection Method for Water Surface Small Object DetectionJiannan Zhu0Yixin Yang1Yuwei Cheng2School of Marine Science and Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710068, ChinaSchool of Marine Science and Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710068, ChinaORCA-Uboat, Xi’an 710004, ChinaUnmanned surface vehicles (USVs) have wide applications in marine inspection and monitoring, terrain mapping, and water surface cleaning. Accurate and robust environment perception ability is essential for achieving autonomy in USVs. Small object detection on water surfaces is an important environment perception task, typically achieved by visual detection using cameras. However, existing vision-based small object detection methods suffer from performance degradation in complex water surface environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar-aided vision detection method that enables automatic data association and fusion between mmWave radar point clouds and images. Through testing on real-world data, the proposed method demonstrates significant performance improvement over vision-based object detection methods without introducing more computational costs, making it suitable for real-time application on USVs. Furthermore, the image–radar data association model in the proposed method can serve as a plug-and-play module for other object detection methods.https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/11/9/1794unmanned surface vehicleobject detectionvisual–radar fusion
spellingShingle Jiannan Zhu
Yixin Yang
Yuwei Cheng
A Millimeter-Wave Radar-Aided Vision Detection Method for Water Surface Small Object Detection
Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
unmanned surface vehicle
object detection
visual–radar fusion
title A Millimeter-Wave Radar-Aided Vision Detection Method for Water Surface Small Object Detection
title_full A Millimeter-Wave Radar-Aided Vision Detection Method for Water Surface Small Object Detection
title_fullStr A Millimeter-Wave Radar-Aided Vision Detection Method for Water Surface Small Object Detection
title_full_unstemmed A Millimeter-Wave Radar-Aided Vision Detection Method for Water Surface Small Object Detection
title_short A Millimeter-Wave Radar-Aided Vision Detection Method for Water Surface Small Object Detection
title_sort millimeter wave radar aided vision detection method for water surface small object detection
topic unmanned surface vehicle
object detection
visual–radar fusion
url https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/11/9/1794
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