title: Sea-Based Infrared Scene Interpretation by Background Type Classification and Coastal Region Detection for Small Target Detection.
abstract: Sea-based infrared search and track (IRST) is important for homeland security by detecting missiles and asymmetric boats. This paper proposes a novel scheme to interpret various infrared scenes by classifying the infrared background types and detecting the coastal regions in omni-directional images. The background type or region-selective small infrared target detector should be deployed to maximize the detection rate and to minimize the number of false alarms. A spatial filter-based small target detector is suitable for identifying stationary incoming targets in remote sea areas with sky only. Many false detections can occur if there is an image sector containing a coastal region, due to ground clutter and the difficulty in finding true targets using the same spatial filter-based detector. A temporal filter-based detector was used to handle these problems. Therefore, the scene type and coastal region information is critical to the success of IRST in real-world applications. In this paper, the infrared scene type was determined using the relationships between the sensor line-of-sight (LOS) and a horizontal line in an image. The proposed coastal region detector can be activated if the background type of the probing sector is determined to be a coastal region. Coastal regions can be detected by fusing the region map and curve map. The experimental results on real infrared images highlight the feasibility of the proposed sea-based scene interpretation. In addition, the effects of the proposed scheme were analyzed further by applying region-adaptive small target detection.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Engineering, Yeungnam University, 280 Daehak-Ro, Gyeongsan, Gyeongbuk 38541, Korea. sunghokim@ynu.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Sungho
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kim
keywords: background type; coastal region detection; horizontal line; infrared scene interpretation; line-of-sight; region-dependent detector