Title
Region descriptors for automatic classification of small sea targets in infrared video
Author
Mouthaan, M.M.
van den Broek, S.P.
Hendriks, E.A.
Schwering, P.B.W.
Publication year
2011
Abstract
We evaluate the performance of different key-point detectors and region descriptors when used for automatic classification of small sea targets in infrared video. In our earlier research performed on this subject as well as in other literature, many different region descriptors have been proposed. However, it is unclear which methods are most applicable to use on the type of infrared imagery as used onboard naval ships. The key-point detector should detect points of interest that can be used to effectively describe the objects in the imagery. On the basis of the detected key points, the descriptors should discriminate between different classes of small sea targets while being robust to differences in viewing conditions. We propose a similarity measure based on the distance between key-point location and the Euclidean distance between descriptors to quantify the similarity of images. For performance evaluation, we use the receiver operator characteristic as the criterion to rank the evaluated methods. We compare the Harris-, blob- and scale-invariant feature transform(SIFT) detectors and the square neighborhood, steerable filters, invariant moments, and SIFT descriptors.We conclude that the Harris detector combined with the square neighborhood of size 19×19 or the SIFT descriptor results in the best classification performance for our data set.
Subject
Physics & Electronics
II - Intelligent Imaging ; ED - Electronic Defence
TS - Technical Sciences
Image processing
Classifications
Key points
Region descriptors
Harris
Scale-invariant
Feature transform
Infrared
Receiver operator characteristics
Target classification
Infrared images
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c08698e0-b202-4b36-86d9-7681910d7945
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1117/1.3549907
TNO identifier
434215
Source
Optical Engineering, 50 (3)
Article number
037002
Document type
article