Extended active contours approach for mine detection in synthetic aperture sonar images

In this paper the problem of contour extraction in sonar images is addressed. We talk in this context about naval mines placed on the seafloor which are still a vast restraint in civil and military shipping. This potential risk is typically encountered by advanced sonar signal processing techniques and a huge amount of human interactions. To reduce at least the human interactions an automatic procedure is desired. Therefore we introduce a novel automatic target extraction algorithm based on active contours employing a specific shadow locating energy motivated by our experiments. Additionally we use a K-means based thresholding process and a Kolmogorov Smirnov (KS) test for improving the initial guess and therefore optimizing the overall performance.