On the small ship target detection based on panoramic vision

The small target detection is an important and difficult problem in the image processing field. According the problem of small ship target detection in complex background which is gathered by panoramic vision system, this paper presents a practical method of small ship target detection based on the panoramic visible image. On the basis of the panoramic image preprocessing, this paper designs a detection method based on ellipses fitting, which can detect and extract sea-sky-line. Then, using the brightness characteristic of the target on extracted sea-sky-line, this paper designs a single window threshold method based on accurate sea-sky-line area constraints, which can lock the small ship target. The results show that this method can detect the small ship target in the background of complex sea effectively.