Moving ships detection via the trajectory feature extraction from spatiotemporal slices of infrared maritime videos

In practical application scenarios, maritime infrared videos often contain different types of sea state scenes, weather conditions, shooting time, shooting distance, etc. In these different types of maritime videos, ship targets have great differences in size, grayscale distribution and contrast, which brings difficulties to ship target detection. At the same time, the diversity of fluctuation, grayscale distribution and reflected light of the sea surface will bring unpredictable interference noise to ship target detection. How to accurately detect ship targets in complex and changeable maritime infrared videos is a challenging task and research focus. The key to achieving accurate ship detection is to extract robust target features that can effectively distinguish targets from all the background noises. In this paper, a novel infrared video ship target detection algorithm based on spatiotemporal slice target trajectory features extraction is proposed. The algorithm is very sensitive to real targets and has excellent anti-noise ability. The main innovation of the algorithm is to extract the target trajectory feature from the spatiotemporal slice of the sequence image and generate the trajectory feature map. We use the trajectory texture formed by the ship target in the spatiotemporal slice to extract the target feature, which can greatly suppress the background noise. The adaptive dilation linear model algorithm can effectively detect the target trajectory line in the spatiotemporal slice. In addition, we also make full use of the gradient of the target trajectory line to distinguish different target trajectory pixels, and propose an adaptive iterative dilation target region localization algorithm combined with gradient consistency. For object segmentation, we calculate the segmentation double-threshold using the adjacent surrounding background pixels of the target, so as to achieve target segmentation of multiple grayscale distribution types. Finally, in the comparison experiment, our algorithm shows superior target detection performance, especially when detecting ships from a large number of highlighted sea clutter background, the robust anti-noise ability of the algorithm can be highlighted. © 2024 Elsevier B.V.