Abstract In order to meet the needs of intelligent ships to capture and grasp small targets while navigating on water and to be able to sense and avoid small targets, a water target detection method based on the YOLOv5-s algorithm is proposed, and the experimental equipment is allowed to perform real-time and high-precision target recognition and sensing in a dynamic water environment. This method uses the view acquisition by using the ZED 2i binocular camera, and the RGB images obtained by the binocular camera ar…