Ship target detection and tracking in cluttered infrared imagery

Abstract

This paper proposes a robust detection and tracking method that can detect and track ship targets in cluttered forward looking infrared image sequences. The proposed method includes two major steps, tar- get detection and target tracking. Because the target's imaging size will be scaled-up gradually along with the imaging distance being reduced, the target's imaging process is analyzed in detail and the target's imag- ing size is estimated in real-time. Based on the estimation of the target's imaging size, the targets with different imaging sizes can be treated as small targets by image scaling operation and detected successfully us- ing the improved multilevel filter and iterative segmentation technique. In the tracking stage, the histogram back-projection technique, which has little effect on the movement of the camera, is applied to the mean shift procedure for real-time application. Extensive experiments demonstrate the utility and the performance of the proposed approach. C