Detecting Infrared Maritime Targets Overwhelmed in Sun Glitters by Antijitter Spatiotemporal Saliency

When detecting infrared maritime targets on sunny days, strong sun glitters can lower the detection accuracy tremendously. To this problem, we proposed a robust antijitter spatiotemporal saliency generation with parallel binarization (ASSGPB) method. Its main contribution is to facilitate to improve the infrared maritime target detection accuracy in this situation. The ASSGPB algorithm exploits the target’s spatial saliency and temporal consistency to separate real targets from clutter areas. The ASSGPB first corrects image intensity distribution with a central inhibition difference of Gaussian filter. Then, a self-defined spatiotemporal saliency map (STSM) generator is used to generate an STSM in five consecutive frames while compensating interframe jitters by a joint block matching. Finally, a parallel binarization method is adopted to segment real targets in STSM while keeping full target areas. To evaluate the performance of ASSGPB, we captured eight different image sequences (20420 frames in total) that were significantly contaminated by strong sun glitters. The ASSGPB realized 100% detection rate and 0.45% false alarm rate in these data sets, greatly outperforming four state-of-the-art algorithms. Thus, a great applicability of ASSGPB has been verified through our experiments.

[1]  Xin Ran,et al.  Feature extraction for rescue target detection based on multi-spectral image analysis , 2015, 2015 International Conference on Transportation Information and Safety (ICTIS).

[2]  Sungho Kim,et al.  Scale invariant small target detection by optimizing signal-to-clutter ratio in heterogeneous background for infrared search and track , 2012, Pattern Recognit..

[3]  Christof Koch,et al.  A Model of Saliency-Based Visual Attention for Rapid Scene Analysis , 2009 .

[4]  Edward H. Adelson,et al.  The Laplacian Pyramid as a Compact Image Code , 1983, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[5]  Michael Engel,et al.  Sea Spotter: A fully staring Naval IRST System , 2013, Defense, Security, and Sensing.

[6]  Feza Arikan,et al.  DAMA—Infrared Sea Modeling and Analysis Software , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[7]  Christof Koch,et al.  Feature combination strategies for saliency-based visual attention systems , 2001, J. Electronic Imaging.

[8]  Soon Kwon,et al.  Three plot correlation-based small infrared target detection in dense sun-glint environment for infrared search and track , 2012, Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[9]  N. Otsu.  A threshold selection method from gray level histograms , 1979 .

[10]  Sungho Kim.  Analysis of small infrared target features and learning-based false detection removal for infrared search and track , 2013, Pattern Analysis and Applications.

[11]  Yuanyuan Ji,et al.  An infrared maritime target detection algorithm applicable to heavy sea fog , 2015 .

[12]  Daniele Nardi,et al.  Enhancing Automatic Maritime Surveillance Systems With Visual Information , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[13]  Carl J. Legleiter,et al.  Removing sun glint from optical remote sensing images of shallow rivers , 2017 .

[14]  Christof Koch,et al.  Modeling attention to salient proto-objects , 2006, Neural Networks.

[15]  Bin Wang,et al.  Antivibration pipeline-filtering algorithm for maritime small target detection , 2014 .

[16]  William J. Plant,et al.  Short wind waves on the ocean: Long‐wave and wind‐speed dependences , 2015 .

[17]  Zhang Zhenduo,et al.  Performance of eliminating sun glints reflected off wave surface by polarization filtering under influence of waves , 2016 .

[18]  Xu Qia.  Adaptive Infrared Warship Target Segmentation in Strong Sun-glint Environment , 2015 .

[19]  Ming Zhao,et al.  Robust Infrared Maritime Target Detection Based on Visual Attention and Spatiotemporal Filtering , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[20]  Qian Du,et al.  A Randomized Subspace Learning Based Anomaly Detector for Hyperspectral Imagery , 2018, Remote. Sens..

[21]  Oliver Zielinski,et al.  Methods in reducing surface reflected glint for shipborne above-water remote sensing , 2013 .

[22]  W. Pierson,et al.  A proposed spectral form for fully developed wind seas based on the similarity theory of S , 1964 .

[23]  Michael J. DeWeert,et al.  Performance of an EO/IR sensor system in marine search and rescue , 2005, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[24]  Li-Chung Wu,et al.  Bathymetry Determination From Marine Radar Image Sequences Using the Hilbert Transform , 2017, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

[25]  Huijie Zhao,et al.  Mid-infrared imaging system based on polarizers for detecting marine targets covered in sun glint. , 2016, Optics express.

[26]  David K. Lynch,et al.  Glitter and glints on water. , 2011, Applied optics.

[27]  Weiyue Li,et al.  Low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition-based anomaly detection for hyperspectral imagery , 2014 .

[28]  Sungho Kim,et al.  Small Infrared Target Detection by Region-Adaptive Clutter Rejection for Sea-Based Infrared Search and Track , 2014, Sensors.

[29]  Gang Yang,et al.  Randomized subspace-based robust principal component analysis for hyperspectral anomaly detection , 2018 .

[30]  Lei Ren,et al.  Search Aid System Based on Machine Vision and Its Visual Attention Model for Rescue Target Detection , 2010, 2010 Second WRI Global Congress on Intelligent Systems.

[31]  Pietro Perona,et al.  Overcomplete steerable pyramid filters and rotation invariance , 1994, 1994 Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[32]  Edmund A. Milne,et al.  Dual-band infrared polarization measurements of sun glint from the sea surface , 1992, Defense, Security, and Sensing.

[33]  Jie Ma,et al.  A Robust Directional Saliency-Based Method for Infrared Small-Target Detection Under Various Complex Backgrounds , 2013, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

[34]  Huijie Zhao,et al.  The polarization patterns of skylight reflected off wave water surface. , 2013, Optics express.

[35]  Wei Meng,et al.  Adaptive method of dim small object detection with heavy clutter. , 2013, Applied optics.

[36]  Bin Wang,et al.  Texture orientation-based algorithm for detecting infrared maritime targets. , 2015, Applied optics.

[37]  Samantha J. Lavender,et al.  Sun Glint Correction of High and Low Spatial Resolution Images of Aquatic Scenes: a Review of Methods for Visible and Near-Infrared Wavelengths , 2009, Remote. Sens..

[38]  S Ullman,et al.  Shifts in selective visual attention: towards the underlying neural circuitry. , 1985, Human neurobiology.