A new method of inshore ship detection in
high-resolution optical remote
sensing images
Qifeng HU
1
, Yaling DU
2
, Yunqiu JIANG
2
, Delie MING
1
1. State Key Laboratory for Multispectral Information Processing Technologies, School of
Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
2. National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Aerospace Automatic Control Institue,
Beijing 100854, China
Abstract: Ship as an important military target and water transportation, of which the
detection has great significance. In the military field, the automatic detection of ships can be
used to monitor ship dynamic in the harbor and maritime of enemy, and then analyze the
enemy naval power. In civilian field, the automatic detection of ships can be used in
monitoring transportation of harbor and illegal behaviors such as illegal fishing, smuggling
and pirates, etc. In recent years, research of ship detection is mainly concentrated in three
categories: forward-looking infrared images, downward-looking SAR image, and optical
remote sensing images with sea background. Little research has been done into ship
detection of optical remote sensing images with harbor background, as the gray-scale and
texture features of ships are similar to the coast in high-resolution optical remote sensing
images. In this paper, we put forward an effective harbor ship target detection method. First
of all, in order to overcome the shortage of the traditional difference method in obtaining
histogram valley as the segmentation threshold, we propose an iterative histogram valley
segmentation method which separates the harbor and ships from the water quite well.
Secondly, as landing ships in optical remote sensing images usually lead to discontinuous
harbor edges, we use Hough Transform method to extract harbor edges. First, lines are
detected by Hough Transform. Then, lines that have similar slope are connected into a new
line, thus we access continuous harbor edges. Secondary segmentation on the result of the
land-and-sea separation, we eventually get the ships. At last, we calculate the aspect ratio of
the ROIs, thereby remove those targets which are not ship. The experiment results show that
our method has good robustness and can tolerate a certain degree of noise and occlusion.
Key words: optical remote sensing images, inshore ship detection, histogram valley
segmentation, Hough Transform, minimum enclosing rectangle
1. Introduction
The Automatic detection of ship, which is an important Military target and Transport
carrier on the water, is of great significance. In the aspect of military, it can be used for
monitoring dynamic of ships on the enemy port and ocean as well as analyzing of the enemy
naval power [1]. In the aspect of civil, it can be used for monitoring transportation on the
port and ocean, detecting Illegal activities such as illegal fishing, smuggling and pirating.
In recent years, the researches of ship detection mainly focused on: forward-looking
Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9675, 967523 · © 2015 SPIE · CCC code: 0277-786X/15/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.2199814
Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9675 967523-1