Vessel freeboard calculation method based on laser scanning

In the inland river shipping business, vessel freeboard value is considered as the primary standard to measure whether the ship is overloaded or not, so vessel freeboard calculation methods become an important topic to concern. This paper presents a vessel freeboard measurement scheme based on laser scanning technology, which can calculate the freeboard value with high accuracy by combining with K-MEANS clustering analysis and Hough transform. This method has been applied to the actual inland river shipping monitoring system and has gotten good performance. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.