Graph-based ship extraction scheme for optical satellite image

Automatic detection and recognition of ship in satellite images is very important and has a wide array of applications. This paper concentrates on optical satellite sensor, which provides an important approach for ship monitoring. Graph-based fore/background segmentation scheme is used to extract ship candidant from optical satellite image chip after the detection step, from course to fine. Shadows on the ship are extracted in a CFAR scheme. Because all the parameters in the graph-based algorithms and CFAR are adaptively determined by the algorithms, no parameter tuning problem exists in our method. Experiments based on measured optical satellite images shows our method achieved good balance between computation speed and ship extraction accuracy.