Smart Ship Draft Reading by Dual-Flow Deep Learning Architecture and Multispectral Information

In maritime transportation, a ship’s draft survey serves as a primary method for weighing bulk cargo. The accuracy of the ship’s draft reading determines the fairness of bulk cargo transactions. Human visual-based draft reading methods face issues such as safety concerns, high labor costs, and subjective interpretation. Therefore, some image processing methods are utilized to achieve automatic draft reading. However, due to the limitations in the spectral characteristics of RGB images, existing image processing methods are susceptible to water surface environmental interference, such as reflections. To solve this issue, we obtained and annotated 524 multispectral images of a ship’s draft as the research dataset, marking the first application of integrating NIR information and RGB images for automatic draft reading tasks. Additionally, a dual-branch backbone named BIF is proposed to extract and combine spectral information from RGB and NIR images. The backbone network can be combined with the existing segmentation head and detection head to perform waterline segmentation and draft detection. By replacing the original ResNet-50 backbone of YOLOv8, we reached a mAP of 99.2% in the draft detection task. Similarly, combining UPerNet with our dual-branch backbone, the mIoU of the waterline segmentation task was improved from 98.9% to 99.3%. The inaccuracy of the draft reading is less than ±0.01 m, confirming the efficacy of our method for automatic draft reading tasks.