Measuring small boats using non-contact method

Abstract

In designing a ship, offset data or lines plan drawing is the most important information about the ship, since the ship’s performance is derived from such data or drawing. Normally, traditional boats are built without involving proper ship drawings. Therefore, these boats’ performance analysis is difficult without the line drawing. This paper presents a study on boat measurement using photogrammetry technique. The main objective of this study is to develop and test photogrammetry method to obtain the best hull form of a small boat. Initially, the method was tested on small fishing boat model having a length of 2.5 m to assess its accuracy. Once the method reliability had been verified, a more comprehensive method was developed and applied to an actual fishing boat having length of 3.55 m. In this study, Digital Single Lens Reflex camera was used to obtain the three-dimensional (3D) coordinate from captured two-dimensional (2D) photograph. Circular retro reflection target tape was used in this study to mark the boat hull according to line of station and buttock line as the referencing purpose. Australis 6.0.6 software was used for image processing to obtain X, Y and Z coordinates of retro reflection target and transferring those coordinates into Maxsurf naval architecture software. The result obtained indicated that the method developed was able to obtain the lines plan of the boat. However, some factors still need to be considered to improve the accuracy of the measurement.