Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication PrinciplesA Method to Extract Future Warships in Complex Sea-Sky Background which May Be Virtually Invisible

The next generation of warships might be virtually invisible to the human eye. This can be achieved by painting ships with metamaterial. These materials can bend light around object, making it to appear to an observer as though the waves have passed through empty space. We have developed a method to identify these ships target with the help of image processing. Research on the extraction of ship target in complex sea-sky background has important value to improve the capability of imaging-typed sea navigation and nautical traffic control systems. According to the imaging property of complex sea-sky background, a reliable ship target extraction method is proposed in this paper. The general guide line is that getting the sea-sky division line as a priori knowledge and then the target potential area is determined through discontinuous region of the sea-sky division line. Firstly, a local selective window filter is adopted to filter the image; secondly, eight directions Sobel operator edge detection method and gradient Hough transform are combined to extract sea-sky division line in the image; then a multi-histogram matching technique is adopted to remove the sea and sky background and thus ship target is extracted from complex background. The experiments show that our method has the merits of robustness to noise, small computational complexity and stability.