An adaptive moving ship detection and tracking based on edge information and morphological operations

Moving ship detection and tracking is the key technology in the intelligence coastal surveillance system. In this paper we present an adaptive and improved method to accurately detect and monitor ships within the area of interest. It is an advanced version of the previous works done regarding moving ship detection and tracking. The proposed tracking scheme is based on the characteristics of both sea and ship, which include: background information and local position of the ship. We used Morphological "open" operation and frame-subtraction method for background subtraction. The ships are located using the edge information along morphological "thicken", "dilate" and "bridge" operations. The experimental results demonstrate robust and real-time ship detection and tracking over thousands of image frames, and robustness against cluttered background. The detection rate achieved was 98.4%.