From Broadcast to Dialogue: VHF-Enhanced Smart Buoys for Intelligent Ship-Shore Speech Interaction

As Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) emerge, the coexistence of various ship automation levels raises the need for effective speech interaction among vessels, shore stations, and autonomous systems. Traditional buoys lack speech capabilities, limiting their role in interactive communications. This paper presents a VHF-enhanced smart buoy system that supports speech enhancement, recognition, understanding, and synthesis, optimized for edge deployment. A lightweight VHFGDF model improves speech quality in noisy maritime environments, while the VHFSR model enhances recognition accuracy under VHF-specific conditions. Implemented on the Jetson Orin Nano platform, the system achieves sub-200 ms interaction latency. Experimental results demonstrate improved Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) and Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) scores over existing methods. This work advances buoy functionality from passive broadcasters to intelligent speech-interactive terminals in maritime communication systems.