Automatic initialization for naval application of graph segmentation techniques: A comparative study

Nowadays, many different image processing applications are of high interest to maritime authorities because of security reasons. Depending on the application, different kinds of images are employed. The extraction of ship silhouettes requires high resolution images in order to obtain accurate results. However, when the characteristics of the naval environment are visible the background complexity increases greatly and automatic approaches fail. In order to overcome these difficulties we propose an automatic initialization for graph segmentation techniques. A comparative study of earlier suggested initializations for different graph segmentation techniques is also presented. It shows that, under such unfavorable image conditions, finding the proper initialization in an automatic way is not trivial. Yet, the precision and recall achieved by our initialization are considerable higher regardless the graph segmentation. Furthermore, the performance is highly increased since the best results are obtained after only the first iteration.