Vessel detection based on dual-operator log-pol top-hat filter

Vessel detection has been widely used in Marine Surveillance to automatically detect potential threats over a huge oceanic area. However, the uncertainty of ship direction and the interference of environment factors, such as sea waves and cloud, will greatly reduce the detection accuracy. In order to solve the above problems and provide robustness to environmental conditions, we combine the property of polar-logarithmic coordinate and proposed our method named “Dual-operator log-pol top-hat filter (DOLPTH)” to make better use of the difference information between the vessel and the background. Different situations are designed to test the performance of our algorithm compared with other algorithms. The experimental results show that in both cases, DOLPTH can maintain high accuracy and has good detection performance.