Automatic Detection Method of Sea Surface Target Based on Morphological Processing

Aiming at the typical features of IR image under complex sea-sky background such as low contrast and fuzzy image edge, an automatic detection method of sea surface target based on morphological processing is proposed in this paper. At first the preprocesses such as denoising and contrast enhancement are carried out, then the Hough transform is employed to detect the sea-sky-line, and the target potential area is determined, then edge detection, dilation and hole filling are used to obtain the whole connected region of the target. Finally, the automatic detection of the target is achieved by extracting the contour of the connected region. The experimental results show that the method can effectively detect the sea surface target in complex sea-sky background, and it can lay a good foundation for subsequent geometric features extraction and recognition.