Ship detection from optical satellite image using optical flow and saliency

Abstract

This paper present an effective method for ship detection using optical flow and saliency methods from optical satellite images, which can be able to identify more than one ship targets in the complex dynamic sea background and succeeds to reduce the false positive rate compared to traditional methods. In this paper, moving targets in the image are highlighted through the classical optical flow method, and the dynamic waves are restrained by combining the state-of-art saliency method. We make the best of the low-level (size, color, etc.) and high-level (adjacent frames information, etc.) features of image, which can adapt to different dynamic background situation. Compared to existing method, experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method with high performance.