• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.410-418
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• 2023

Recently, advancements and commercialization in the field of maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS) has rapidly progressed. Concurrently, studies are also underway to develop methods for automatically surveying the condition of various on-board equipment remotely to ensure the navigational safety of MASS. One key issue that has gained prominence is the method to obtain values from analog gauges installed in various equipment through image processing. This approach has the advantage of enabling the non-contact detection of gauge values without modifying or changing already installed or planned equipment, eliminating the need for type approval changes from shipping classifications. The objective of this study was to identify a dynamically changing indicator needle within noisy images of analog gauges. The needle object must be identified because its position significantly affects the accurate reading of gauge values. An analog pressure gauge attached to an emergency fire pump model was used for image capture to identify the needle object. The acquired images were pre-processed through Gaussian filtering, thresholding, and morphological operations. The needle object was then identified through Hough Transform. The experimental results confirmed that the center and object of the indicator needle could be identified in images of noisy analog gauges. The findings suggest that the image processing method applied in this study can be utilized for shape identification in analog gauges installed on ships. This study is expected to be applicable as an image processing method for the automatic remote survey of MASS.