An approach for visual attention based on biquaternion and its application for ship detection in multispectral imagery

This paper proposes an approach for visual attention based on biquaternion, and investigates its application for ship detection in multispectral imagery. The proposed approach describes high-dimensional data in the form of biquaternion and utilizes the phase spectrum of biquaternion Fourier transform to generate a required saliency map that can be used for salient target detection. In our method, the multidimensional data is processed as a whole, and the features contained in each spectral band can be extracted effectively. Compared with traditional visual attention approaches, our method has very low computational complexity. Experimental results on simulated and real multispectral remote sensing data have shown that the proposed method has excellent performance in ship detection. Furthermore, our method is robust against white noise and almost meets real-time requirements, which has great potentials in engineering applications.