Patent ID: 7174242

Claim:
A method of predicting an orientation of a vessel, said method comprising the steps of: inputting roll data describing a roll of said vessel; inputting pitch data describing a pitch of said vessel; inputting heading data describing a heading of said vessel; applying a travelling mean window to said roll data, pitch data and heading data to obtain a time moving average roll data, time moving average pitch data; and time moving average heading data; filtering any offset data of said time moving average roll data, time moving average pitch data and time moving average heading data, such that said time moving average roll data, pitch data and heading data has a zero mean value; applying an auto-regression process to said zero mean time moving average roll data, pitch data and heading data; predicting angles of movement of major three dimensional X, Y and Z axes of said vessel from an output of said auto-regression process, and said mean roll data, pitch data and heading data; and storing a result of said predicted angles as a set of rotation matrix data.