Vessels traffic estimation through image processing applied to acquisitions by hydrophones

In the last years, harbor traffic is increasing due to commercial market spread and also tourism activities in the field of cruises. So, trying to infer about how many vessels enter or leave a harbor may give a lot of information about the behavior of companies/people and this can be used as a feedback information for dimensioning harbors, that is reducing their size or increasing it. In this regard, measuring and estimating vessels traffic in a harbor area can be an interesting and challenging task in place of storing, sometimes manually, a lot of information. To do so, we resort to the use of multiple underwater hydrophones for acquiring signals and recognizing, thanks to the use of image-processing tools applied to Wigner-Ville Transform of the recorded sounds, the presence and behavior of possible present vessels. © 2015 IEEE.