Detection of Moving Ships in Sequences of Remote Sensing Images

High-speed agile remote sensing satellites have the ability to capture multiple sequences of images. However, the frame rate is lower and the baseline between each image is much longer than normal image sequences. As a result, the edges and shadows in each image in the sequence vary considerably. Therefore, more requirements are placed on the target detection algorithm. Aiming at the characteristics of multi-view image sequences, we propose an approach to detect moving ships on the water surface. Based on marker controlled watershed segmentation, we use the extracted foreground and background images to segment moving ships, and we obtain the complete shape and texture information of the ships. The inter-frame difference algorithm is applied to extract the foreground object information, while Otsu’s algorithm is used to extract the image background. The foreground and background information is fused to solve the problem of interference with object detection caused by long imaging baseline. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for moving ship detection