Detection algorithm for IR ship target in complex background of sea and sky

In complex sea background, the ship target in the IR image often appears near the sea-sky region, and the sea-sky region is appeared as a horizontal or nearly horizontal block region, so the primary step of the IR target detection is to localize the sea-sky region. According to this characteristic of the target and background in the IR image, a detection algorithm for IR ship target detection in complex sea background is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the low frequency subimage and horizontal detail subimage is obtained by the multi-scale analysis of wavelet transform. Secondly, the gray projection and binary clustering segmentation method are combined to localize the sea-sky-line in the image, the target potential area, that is, sea-sky-region, is also determined. Finally, the multi-level filter method is adopted to detect the ship target in the sea-sky region. The experiment result show that this algorithm can effectively reduce the computational complexity, enhance the real-time execution and possess of high detection probability.