# Visual Navigation Systems for Maritime Smart Ships: A Survey
###### Abstract  
The rapid development of artificial intelligence has greatly ensured maritime safety and made outstanding contributions to the protection of the marine environment. However, improving maritime safety still faces many challenges. In this paper, the development background and industry needs of smart ships are first studied. Then, it analyzes the development of smart ships for navigation from various fields such as the technology industry and regulation. Then, the importance of navigation technology is analyzed, and the current status of key technologies of navigation systems is deeply analyzed. Meanwhile, this paper also focuses on single perception technology and integrated perception technology based on single perception technology. As the development of artificial intelligence means that intelligent shipping is inevitably the trend for future shipping, this paper analyzes the future development trend of smart ships and visual navigation systems, providing a clear perspective on the future direction of visual navigation technology for smart ships. smart ship; visual navigation technology; situation awareness; maritime safety +
Footnote †: journal: Marine Science and Engineering  
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of smart ships due to the high impact of the human factor. However, quantifying what percentage of accidents can be prevented by smart ships is difficult since accidents are usually not caused by pure human error. [PERSON] et al. (2021) evaluated the percentage reduction in loss of life for different scenarios where autonomous shipping is applied, assuming that the types of events affected are only related to navigation. The percentage reductions for the scenarios were 47.4% for small cargo ships being unmanned, 69.5% for all cargo ships being unmanned and 100% for all ships being unmanned. As can be seen from the data, the number of maritime shipping accidents is likely to be reduced with unmanned ships, and the development of smart ships will greatly enhance the safety of maritime navigation [4]. In previous studies on the safety of ship navigation, researchers have tended to focus mainly on how to quantify maritime risks and to focus on the relationship between humans and maritime safety and on the impact of human situation awareness on ship safety. Most of the studies only mention the development related to smart ships and the improvement of autonomous collision avoidance systems. In this paper, the development of collision avoidance technology and the importance of improving situation awareness are also studied relevantly. However, unlike the traditional approach of previous studies, this paper outlines the IMO-related guidelines and industry specifications for smart ships, which provides a background for subsequent studies on smart ships. At the same time, this paper also outlines the development and progress of smart ships, not only studying the progress of collision avoidance technology, which has mainly appeared since the development of smart ships, but also focusing on different kinds of visual perception technology, integrating different technologies into one system. By studying the organic combination of visual perception technology and collision avoidance technology, we expect to further enhance the safety of maritime navigation. In addition, this paper does not discuss a single visual perception technology, but analyzes and integrates the main visual perception technologies, which effectively deepens the depth of the research on visual perception. Through computer assistance, a visual navigation system visualizes the decisions of a visual navigation unit in order to reduce the cognitive workload of the staff and further enhance the situation awareness of the pilots. With the development of a new generation of artificial intelligence technology, autonomous systems have been widely used in the fields of unmanned vehicles, underwater vehicles and unmanned aircraft.