Iterative infrared ship target segmentation based on multiple features

• Designing a global background subtraction filter for suppressing background.
• Designing an adaptive row mean subtraction filter for enhancing the targets.
• Constructing four distinctive shape features and one selection criterion to identify ship targets.

This paper presents an efficient method for ship target segmentation in infrared (IR) images. It consists of mainly two procedures: iterative image segmentation and ship target selection. First, based on the intensity distribution of an IR image, we design a global background subtraction filter (GBSF) to suppress the background, and an adaptive row mean subtraction filter (ARMSF) to enhance the target. After iteratively applying these two filters, we can obtain a proper threshold for image segmentation. Second, based on the geometric properties of the ship target, we construct four shape features and a selection criterion to identify the real target and remove the non-target regions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively segment ship targets from different backgrounds in IR images. The advantage of the proposed method over the others in the previous literatures is validated in both visual and quantitative comparisons, especially for IR images with low contrast and uneven intensities.