Fusion detection of ship targets in low resolution multi-spectral images

Aiming at ship detection in multi-spectral images at low resolution, this paper proposes a new method for ship detection based on fusion detection which combines spectral feature with thermal feature. Firstly, it selects infrared band instead of visible band image to detect cloud according to size feature. With cloud available, it does segmentation work in thermal infrared image for the removal of cloud pixels. Then, the result is mapped to the IR images and cloud masking is completed. Next, the fusion of two kinds of images using wavelet transform is adopted. At last, the fused image is used to detect ships and morphological operations are used to discriminate ships. The experiment result on multi-spectral data of Landsat 8 shows that the proposed method which is robust against clutter can detect ships effectively.