Thermal Infrared Small Ship Detection in Sea Clutter Based on Morphological Reconstruction and Multi-Feature Analysis

Abstract

The existing thermal infrared (TIR) ship detection methods may suffer serious performance degradation in the situation of heavy sea clutter. To cope with this problem, a novel ship detection method based on morphological reconstruction and multi-feature analysis is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the TIR image is processed by opening- or closing-based gray-level morphological reconstruction (GMR) to smooth intricate background clutter while maintaining the intensity, shape, and contour features of ship target. Then, considering the intensity and contrast features, the fused saliency detection strategy including intensity foreground saliency map (IFSM) and brightness contrast saliency map (BCSM) is presented to highlight potential ship targets and suppress sea clutter. After that, an effective contour descriptor namely average eigenvalue measure of structure tensor (STAEM) is designed to characterize candidate ship targets, and the statistical shape knowledge is introduced to identify true ship targets from residual non-ship targets. Finally, the dual method is adopted to simultaneously detect both bright and dark ship targets in TIR image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the compared state-of-the-art methods, especially for infrared images with intricate sea clutter. Moreover, the proposed method can work stably for ship target with unknown brightness, variable quantities, sizes, and shapes.

Automatic Infrared Ship Target Segmentation Based on Structure Tensor and Maximum Histogram Entropy

“…Yet since the fuzzy inference system is based on prior knowledge, the uncertainty of ship segmentation results would be increased in complex and changeable sea clutter. In our previous work [26], we developed an IR ship target detection method based on morphological reconstruction and multi-feature analysis. Due to the reasonable integration of multiple features after gray-level morphological reconstruction, the method is robust to the detection of both bright and dark small ship target submerged in heavy sea clutter.…”

“…Accordingly, the intensity-based ship target segmentation methods [10], [12], [16] will introduce those uneven parts into the segmentation result and cause under-segmentation. Furthermore, by staring at the appearance model of ship target in IR image, the existing methods commonly assume that the ship target is the uniform region against the sea background [22], [25], [26]. However, for IR ship image with low contrast or near-distance imaging, the intensity of ship target will be inhomogeneous and even the inner parts of the ship target with strong opposite intensities.…”

Novel Methodology for Condition Monitoring of Gear Wear Using Supervised Learning and Infrared Thermography

“…One technique widely used for temperature monitoring is infrared thermography, and this may be a complementary and helpful method in conjunction with the most used and proven techniques for monitoring and detecting faults in a gearbox transmission system. Thereby, infrared imaging is a noninvasive and nondestructive technique that efficiently monitors temperature and possesses a wide range of monitoring and the possibility to visualize and locate hot spots [24] through the increase in temperature caused by the faults present in the gearbox transmission system. Although this technology was expensive in the beginning, low-cost cameras and cores have emerged that make it more accessible and used in various areas such as medicine, manufacturing, and electrical engineering, among others [25][26][27].…”

Classification of Infrared Objects in Manifold Space Using Kullback-Leibler Divergence of Gaussian Distributions of Image Points

“…Feature detection and matching are the basis of many image processing applications in the computer vision domain [1][2][3][4][5] and elsewhere [6]. Infrared small object detection is a focus of ongoing research in numerous areas, such as aircraft tracking [7], ship detection [8], 3D scene reconstruction [9] and video surveillance [10]. Infrared small object recognition in difficult environments such as those with a complex background and object clutter or those with low illumination is highly important, and is a difficult task in infrared search and tracking systems [11].…”