Low Altitude Georeferencing for Imaging Sensors in Maritime Tracking

Abstract

This paper presents a method for georeferencing low-altitude camera sensors, both infrared and electro-optical, in a maritime context. Accurate georeferencing require very high precision for the object pixel coordinates due to sensor resolution. To achieve this we refine the bounding boxes provided by an SSD object detector using the Sobel operator and the Hough transform. Using real world data this method is applied in a maritime tracking system based on the Joint Integrated Probabilistic Data Association method and compared to radar tracking. The georeferenced cameras surpassed radar performance in several of the benchmarks and maintained tracks with greater reliability at the cost of reduced position accuracy.