Maritime target detection from optical remote sensing images plays an important role in related military and civil applications and its weakness lies in its compromised performance under complex uncertain conditions. In this paper, a novel hierarchical ship detection method is proposed to overcome this issue. In the ship detection stage, based on Entropy information, we construct a combined saliency model with self-adaptive weights to prescreen ship candidates from across the entire maritime domain. To characterize ship targets and further reduce the false alarms, we introduce a novel and practical descriptor based on gradient features, and this descriptor is robust against clutter introduced by heavy clouds, islands, ship wakes as well as variation in target size. Furthermore, the proposed method is effective for not only color images but also gray images. The experimental results obtained using real optical remote sensing images have demonstrated that the locations and the number of ships can be determined accurately and that the false alarm rate is greatly decreased. A comprehensive comparison is performed between the proposed method and the state-of-the-art methods, which shows that the proposed method achieves higher accuracy and outperforms all the competing methods. Furthermore, the proposed method is robust under various backgrounds of maritime images and has great potential for providing more accurate target detection in engineering applications.
This paper proposes an infrared (IR) and visible image fusion method introducing region segmentation into the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) region. This method should effectively improve both the target indication and scene spectrum features of fusion images, and the target identification and tracking reliability of fusion system, on an airborne photoelectric platform. The method involves segmenting the region in an IR image by significance, and identifying the target region and the background region; then, fusing the low-frequency components in the DTCWT region according to the region segmentation result. For high-frequency components, the region weights need to be assigned by the information richness of region details to conduct fusion based on both weights and adaptive phases, and then introducing a shrinkage function to suppress noise; Finally, the fused low-frequency and high-frequency components are reconstructed to obtain the fusion image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can fully extract complementary information from the source images to obtain a fusion image with good target indication and rich information on scene details. They also give a fusion result superior to existing popular fusion methods, based on eithers subjective or objective evaluation. With good stability and high fusion accuracy, this method can meet the fusion requirements of IR-visible image fusion systems.
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