A Novel Ship Detection Method Based on Gradient and Integral Feature for Single-Polarization Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery.

Hao Shi,Liang Chen,Mingming Bian,Zhiru Wang,Qingjun Zhang,Hangyu Wang,Jian Yang

doi:10.3390/s18020563

Abstract

With the rapid development of remote sensing technologies, SAR satellites like China’s Gaofen-3 satellite have more imaging modes and higher resolution. With the availability of high-resolution SAR images, automatic ship target detection has become an important topic in maritime research. In this paper, a novel ship detection method based on gradient and integral features is proposed. This method is mainly composed of three steps. First, in the preprocessing step, a filter is employed to smooth the clutters and the smoothing effect can be adaptive adjusted according to the statistics information of the sub-window. Thus, it can retain details while achieving noise suppression. Second, in the candidate area extraction, a sea-land segmentation method based on gradient enhancement is presented. The integral image method is employed to accelerate computation. Finally, in the ship target identification step, a feature extraction strategy based on Haar-like gradient information and a Radon transform is proposed. This strategy decreases the number of templates found in traditional Haar-like methods. Experiments were performed using Gaofen-3 single-polarization SAR images, and the results showed that the proposed method has high detection accuracy and rapid computational efficiency. In addition, this method has the potential for on-board processing.

Highlights

Automatic ship target detection technologies based on remote sensing images play a significant role in many applications, such as ocean monitoring, shipping traffic management and maintenance of maritime rights and interests
Ships are used in many areas of human activity, and artificial interpretation is difficult in remote sensing images of large fields
These results show that most ship slices can be rotated to the desired angle, even the small ships as shown in the last column, which appear the rectangular shape in image

Summary

Introduction

Automatic ship target detection technologies based on remote sensing images play a significant role in many applications, such as ocean monitoring, shipping traffic management and maintenance of maritime rights and interests. SAR images provide information services and provide decision-making support for ocean information applications. Ships are used in many areas of human activity, and artificial interpretation is difficult in remote sensing images of large fields. For this reason, there is a need for a method of automatic ship detection. Due to disturbances in artificial landforms, reefs and huge waves, automatic ship detection in SAR images is a big challenge [2]

Methods

Results

Conclusion