Detecting Small Target of Ship at Sea by Infrared Image

Detecting small target of ship at sea is very important to missile guidance. In this paper, infrared images are used to capture the information of small ship at sea, an edge detector combining with a median filter are used to seek for the sky-sea line and the objects in the images. According to the features of ship targets in sky-sea background, a criterion is set up to distinguish the small ship target from other object. A complete algorithm is introduced, it was simulated in computer with a set of 700 images. The results showed that this algorithm could locate precisely the positions of the small ship targets