Sea Trials of a Navigation System Based on Computer Processing of Marine Radar Images

Abstract

A system which yields the automatic positioning of a ship from computer analysis of marine radar images of nearby coastlines has been tested on data from the survey vessel Maxwell while proceeding in and out of Halifax harbour. Differences between radar-determined position fixes and those obtained by a microwave navigation system with an error of the order i o m show little evidence of additional error when the origin of the radar images used as ‘reference map’ is within 500 m of the actual position. As the distance increases the accuracy slowly decreases.