Ship detection is an important application of optical remote sensing image processing. Sea-land segmentation is the key step in ship detection. Traditional sea-land segment methods only based on the gray-level information of an image to choose a gray threshold to segment the image; however, it is very difficult to establish a self-adapting mechanism to select a suitable threshold for different ...

This paper proposes an automatic ship detection method based on gray-level gathering characteristics of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. The method does not require any prior knowledge about ships and background observation. It uses a novel local gray-level gathering degree (LGGD) to characterize the spatial intensity distribution of SAR image, and then an adaptive-like LGGD thresholding...

We report about a hierarchical design for extracting ship features and recognizing ships from SAR images, and which will eventually feed a multisensor data fusion system for airborne surveillance. The target is segmented from the image background using directional thresholding and region merging processes. Ship end-points are then identified through a ship centerline detection performed with a ...

A new algorithm for ship wake detection is developed with the aim of ship heading and velocity estimation. It exploits the Radon transform and utilizes merit indexes in the intensity domain to validate the detected linear features as real components of the ship wake. Finally, ship velocity is estimated by state-of-the-art techniques of azimuth shift and Kelvin arm wavelength. The algorithm is a...

Benefiting from the improved resolution and polarization information of SAR data, ship recognition has attracted much attention during the last decade. This paper considers the ship recognition in TerraSAR-X imagery. We propose a novel feature extraction algorithm, named Superstructure Scattering Distribution (SSD), by investigating the ship’s superstructure and corresponding electromagnetic sc...

The radiated noise of ships involves strong low-frequency line spectrum, which is greatly related with the working states of auxiliary equipment and the rotation of propeller, and then regarded as the important basis in feature extraction of ships. Moreover, the stochastic resonance has special advantages in the extraction of weak signal. Aiming at the multi-frequency components in radiated noi...

This paper addresses ship target detection in dual-frequency singlepolarization and fully polarimetric SAR data by using a global thresholding approach. The corresponding threshold values were determined from the gamma distribution (for single-polarization SAR data) and the chi-squared distribution (for fully polarimetric SAR data). Based on the experimental results, which were obtained from ni...

A novel fusion-based ship detection method from polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (Pol-SAR) images is proposed in this paper. After feature extraction and constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection, the detection results of HH channel, diplane scattering by Pauli decomposition and helical factor by Barnes decomposition are fused together. The confirmed targets and potential target pixels ca...

Of all the flight modes of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the landing approach and the landing itself are the most difficult and dangerous ones. To perform an automatic landing on a ship deck using a computer vision system (CVS), a UAV must analyze the visual landing markers located on the deck. When the UAV is about to start landing, these markers must be clearly visible and discernible. The...

Spaceborne SAR imagery offers high capability for wide-ranging maritime surveillance especially in situations, where AIS (Automatic Identification System) data is not available. Therefore, maritime objects have to be detected and optional information such as size, orientation, or object/ship class is desired. In recent research work, we proposed a SAR processing chain consisting of pre-processi...