A Length and Width Feature Extraction Method of Ship Target Based on IR Image

Length and width feature of ship target is usually used as the initial criterion for ship type. A length and width feature extraction method of ship target based on IR image is proposed in this paper. At first, the preprocesses such as denoise and contrast enhancement are carried out, then the Hough transform is employed to detect the sea-sky-line, and the target potential area is determined, then edge detection and expansion and hole filling are used to obtain the whole connected region of the target. Finally, the minimum enclosing rectangle of the connected region is obtained according to the minimum area criterion, and the length and width of the minimum enclosing rectangle is the length and width of the ship target. The experimental results show that the method can effectively extract the length and width feature of ship target in complex sea-sky background, then with other auxiliary information can realize ship target recognition.