Ship Bridge OOW Activity Status Detection Using Wi-Fi Beamforming Feedback Information

Officers on Watch (OOWs) of the ship’s bridge play a vital role in maritime navigation safety, monitoring the ship’s navigational status, and ensuring maritime safety. The status of inactive watch officers, such as fatigued driving and negligence on lookout, is one of the main causes of accidents. Intelligent technology for real-time perception and state evaluation of ship OOWs significantly reduces accidents caused by human factors. The traditional computer vision method is difficult to adapt to the complex environment of a ship bridge, and carries strong privacy risks. With the development of Internet of Things technology, sensing technology based on ubiquitous Wi-Fi devices provides a new way to accurately monitor the status of ship OOWs. In this paper, we use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi devices to propose a ship driving activity state detection method based on beamforming feedback information (BFI). Using wireless sensing data to sense the number of OOWs and their driving behavior realizes low-cost and high-precision detection of the behavioral status of the ship’s bridge watchkeeper. Experiments were conducted in a ship-driving simulation laboratory and on a real-world Yangtze River cruise ship. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves 92.4% and 98.1% accuracy for tracking active status and estimating the number of OOWs, respectively.