Robust Sea-Sky-Line Detection Based on Horizontal Projection and Hough Transformation

Sea-sky-line detection in sea-sky background image or video sequences contributes to applications such as small moving object detection and tracking, flight control and port security. A new 2-layered structure method based on horizontal projection and improved Hough transformation is proposed in this paper. In the first layer, sea-sky-line region is located using horizontal projection method, which is a preprocessing step to reduce the disturbance of complex background. In the second layer, sea-sky-line is detected with kernel-based Hough transformation algorithm in the sea-sky-line region. Moreover, five influence factors in complex sea background are also analyzed. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is fast and robust for both infrared images and visible light images.