Comparative Performance of Two 2-D Detectors in the Case of Multipixel Low Contrast Object on a Real Sea Surface

Much interest has arisen in the problem of automatic video detection of small low contrast floating objects on a sea surface. The Modified Matched Subspace Detector (MMSD) has been recently proposed for detecting a barely discernible object in an agitated sea surface. MMSD uses the intensity difference between the sea and the object at relatively high frequencies. In the literature the performances of this detector has been evaluated using only a sea model (additive Gaussian background clutter). In this paper we realize a comparison between classical Matched Subspace Detector (MSD) and MMSD using real sea images with synthetic model of the reflections from floating objects. This paper investigates the comparative MSD and MMSD performance, provided that the energy reflected from the object is equal to the energy reflected from the sea. The paper considers the dependence of the detection probability with a fixed probability of false alarm on the difference between the average of reflections from the sea surface and from a floating object at the different MMSD parameters and standard deviations of reflections from the object and the sea surface.