A novel algorithm based on wavelet transform for ship target detection in optical remote sensing images

The rapid development of the satellite observation technology provides a very rich source of data for sea reconnaissance and ships surveillance. In the face of such a vast sea remote sensing data, it is urgent need to realize the automatic ship detection in optical remote sensing images, but the optical remote sensing images are easily affected by meteorological conditions, such as clouds, waves, which results in larger false alarm; and the weak contrast between optical remote sensing image target and background is easy to cause missing alarm. In this paper, a novel algorithm based on wavelet transform for ship target detection in optical remote sensing images is proposed, which can effectively remove these noise and interference. The segmentation of sea and land background is first applied to the image preprocessing to achieve more accurate detection results, and then discrete wavelet transform is used to deal with the part of sea background. The results show that almost all of the offshore ships can be detected, and through the comparison of the results of four different wavelet basis functions, the accuracy of ship detection is further improved.