Ship structure extraction in isar image sequences by a Markovian approach

In this paper we propose a Multiframe Marked Point Process model of line segments and point groups for automatic ship structure extraction and target tracking in Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) image sequences. For purposes of dealing with scatterer scintillations and high speckle noise in the ISAR frames, we obtain the resulting target sequence by an iterative optimization process, which simultaneously considers the observed image data and various prior geometric interaction constraints between the target appearances in the consecutive frames. Evaluation is performed on real ISAR image sequences of ship targets.