An Invariant Generalized Hough Transform Based Method of Inshore Ships Detection

Automatic inshore ship detection from remote sensing imagery has many important applications, such as ship change detection and harbor dynamic surveillance. Stable performance of inshore ship detection is vital to the analysis of ship change and then determines the harbor surveillance effect. However, it is hard to detect inshore ships utilizing the traditional area-based method because the grayscale and texture character of inshore ships are similar to that of the shore. In this paper, a new method based on invariant generalized Hough transform is introduced to extract ship shape using the evidence-gathering procedure. In contrast with other shape extraction methods used in inshore ships detection, our method is specially tolerant to noise and occlusion, and also invariant to translation, scale and rotation transformation. Moreover, our method can be used to separate ships moored together that can benefit to ship recognition. Experiment results are demonstrated on the optical remote sensing imagery from Google Earth.