A Robust Real-Time Automatic Recognition Prototype for Maritime Optical Morse-Based Communication Employing Modified Clustering Algorithm

Abstract

In maritime communications, the ubiquitous Morse lamp on ships plays a significant role as one of the most common backups to radio or satellites just in case. Despite the advantages of its simplicity and efficiency, the requirement of trained operators proficient in Morse code and maintaining stable sending speed pose a key challenge to this traditional manual signaling manner. To overcome these problems, an automatic system is needed to provide a partial substitute for human effort. However, few works have focused on studying an automatic recognition scheme of maritime manually sent-like optical Morse signals. To this end, this paper makes the first attempt to design and implement a robust real-time automatic recognition prototype for onboard Morse lamps. A modified k-means clustering algorithm of machine learning is proposed to optimize the decision threshold and identify elements in Morse light signals. A systematic framework and detailed recognition algorithm procedure are presented. The feasibility of the proposed system is verified via experimental tests using a light-emitting diode (LED) array, self-designed receiver module, and microcontroller unit (MCU). Experimental results indicate that over 99% of real-time recognition accuracy is realized with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) greater than 5 dB, and the system can achieve good robustness under conditions with low SNR.