Infrared ship detection based on time fluctuation feature and space structure feature in sun-glint scene

Abstract Infrared ship detection is challenging in dense sun-glint scene because some sun-glint clutters are similar to ships in grayscale and local contrast. The large amount of sun-glint clutters increases the false alarm probability of infrared ship detection. Considering that, in infrared sequence images, the ship is stable, while the clutter is constantly changing with the motion of wave. A feature about fluctuation can be designed to describe the changes of candidate targets and eliminate clutters. Meanwhile, in a single-frame infrared image, the ship has a specific shape, while the clutter does not. A high-dimensional feature about structure can be designed to describe the shape of candidate targets and distinguish ships and clutters. In this paper, a novel method based on time fluctuation feature and space structure feature for infrared ship detection in dense sun-glint scene is proposed. The proposed time fluctuation feature and space structure feature can accurately describe the difference between ships and clutters, thereby achieving high-precision and high-recall infrared ship detection in sun-glint scene. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods, especially in dense sun-glint scene.