In traffic?monitoring systems, numerous vision?based approaches have been used to detect vehicle parameters. However, few of these approaches have been used in waterway transport because of the complexity created by factors such as rippling water and lack of calibration object. In this paper, we present an approach to detecting the parameters of a moving ship in an inland river. This approach involves interactive calibration without a calibration reference. We detect a moving ship using an optimized visual foreground detection algorithm that eliminates false detection in dynamic water scenarios, and we detect ship length, width, speed, and flow. We trialed our parameter?detection technique in the Beijing?Hangzhou Grand Canal and found that detection accuracy was greater than 90%for all parameters.