Research on Tracking Approach to Low-flying Weak Small Target near the Sea

摘要

Automatic target detection is very difficult in complicate background of sea and sky because of the clutter caused by waves and clouds nearby the sea-level line. In this paper, in view of the low-flying target near the sea is always above the sea-level line, we can first locate the sea-level line, and neglect the image data beneath the sea-level line. Thus the noise under the sea-level line can be suppressed, and the executive time of target segmentation is also much reduced. A new method is proposed, which first uses neighborhood averaging method to suppress background and enhance targets so as to increase SNR, and then uses the multi-point multi-layer vertical Sobel operator combined with linear least squares fitting to locate the sea-level line, lastly uses the centroid tracking algorithm to detect and track the target. In the experiment, high frame rate and high-resolution digital CCD camera and high performance DSP are applied. Experimental results show that this method can efficiently locate the sea-level line on various conditions of lower contrast, and eliminate the negative impact of the clutter caused by waves and clouds, and capture and track target real-timely and accurately.