A Moving Ship Detection and Tracking Method Based on Optical Remote Sensing Images from the Geostationary Satellite.

Geostationary optical remote sensing satellites, such as the GF-4, have a high temporal resolution and wide coverage, which enables the continuous tracking and observation of ship targets over a large range. However, the ship targets in the images are usually small and dim and the images are easily affected by clouds, islands and other factors, which make it difficult to detect the ship targets. This paper proposes a new method for detecting ships moving on the sea surface using GF-4 satellite images. First, the adaptive nonlinear gray stretch (ANGS) method was used to enhance the image and highlight small and dim ship targets. Second, a multi-scale dual-neighbor difference contrast measure (MDDCM) method was designed to enable detection of the position of the candidate ship target. The shape characteristics of each candidate area were analyzed to remove false ship targets. Finally, the joint probability data association (JPDA) method was used for multi-frame data association and tracking. Our results suggest that the proposed method can effectively detect and track moving ship targets in GF-4 satellite optical remote sensing images, with better detection performance than other classical methods.

Flood Detection in Gaofen-3 SAR Images via Fully Convolutional Networks.

Emergency flood monitoring and rescue need to first detect flood areas. This paper provides a fast and novel flood detection method and applies it to Gaofen-3 SAR images. The fully convolutional network (FCN), a variant of VGG16, is utilized for flood mapping in this paper. Considering the requirement of flood detection, we fine-tune the model to get higher accuracy results with shorter training time and fewer training samples. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our proposed algorithm not only gives robust and accurate detection results but also significantly reduces the detection time.

Geo-Positioning Accuracy Improvement of Multi-Mode GF-3 Satellite SAR Imagery Based on Error Sources Analysis.

The GaoFen-3 (GF-3) satellite is the only synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite in the High-Resolution Earth Observation System Project, which is the first C-band full-polarization SAR satellite in China. In this paper, we proposed some error sources-based weight strategies to improve the geometric performance of multi-mode GF-3 satellite SAR images without using ground control points (GCPs). To get enough tie points, a robust SAR image registration method and the SAR-features from accelerated segment test (SAR-FAST) method is used to achieve the image registration and tie point extraction. Then, the original position of these tie points in object-space is calculated with the help of the space intersection method. With the dataset clustered by the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm, we undertake the block adjustment with a bias-compensated rational function model (RFM) aided to improve the geometric performance of these multi-mode GF-3 satellite SAR images. Different weight strategies are proposed to develop the normal equation matrix according to the error sources analysis of GF-3 satellite SAR images, and the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method is utilized to solve the normal equation. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method can improve the geometric positioning accuracy of GF-3 satellite SAR images within 2 pixels.

Geometric Positioning Accuracy Improvement of ZY-3 Satellite Imagery Based on Statistical Learning Theory.

With the increasing demand for high-resolution remote sensing images for mapping and monitoring the Earth's environment, geometric positioning accuracy improvement plays a significant role in the image preprocessing step. Based on the statistical learning theory, we propose a new method to improve the geometric positioning accuracy without ground control points (GCPs). Multi-temporal images from the ZY-3 satellite are tested and the bias-compensated rational function model (RFM) is applied as the block adjustment model in our experiment. An easy and stable weight strategy and the fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding (FIST) algorithm which is widely used in the field of compressive sensing are improved and utilized to define the normal equation matrix and solve it. Then, the residual errors after traditional block adjustment are acquired and tested with the newly proposed inherent error compensation model based on statistical learning theory. The final results indicate that the geometric positioning accuracy of ZY-3 satellite imagery can be improved greatly with our proposed method.

An Automatic and Novel SAR Image Registration Algorithm: A Case Study of the Chinese GF-3 Satellite.

The Chinese GF-3 satellite launched in August 2016 is a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite that has the largest number of imaging modes in the world. It achieves a free switch in the spotlight, stripmap, scanSAR, wave, global observation and other imaging modes. In order to further utilize GF-3 SAR images, an automatic and fast image registration procedure needs to be done. In this paper, we propose a novel image registration technique for GF-3 images of different imaging modes. The proposed algorithm consists of two stages: coarse registration and fine registration. In the first stage, we combine an adaptive sampling method with the SAR-SIFT algorithm to efficiently eliminate obvious translation, rotation and scale differences between the reference and sensed images. In the second stage, uniformly-distributed control points are extracted, then the fast normalized cross-correlation of an improved phase congruency model is utilized as a new similarity metric to match the reference image and the coarse-registered image in a local search region. Moreover, a selection strategy is used to remove outliers. Experimental results on several GF-3 SAR images of different imaging modes show that the proposed algorithm gives a robust, efficient and precise registration performance, compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms for SAR image registration.

Ship Detection in Gaofen-3 SAR Images Based on Sea Clutter Distribution Analysis and Deep Convolutional Neural Network.

Target detection is one of the important applications in the field of remote sensing. The Gaofen-3 (GF-3) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite launched by China is a powerful tool for maritime monitoring. This work aims at detecting ships in GF-3 SAR images using a new land masking strategy, the appropriate model for sea clutter and a neural network as the discrimination scheme. Firstly, the fully convolutional network (FCN) is applied to separate the sea from the land. Then, by analyzing the sea clutter distribution in GF-3 SAR images, we choose the probability distribution model of Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) detector from K-distribution, Gamma distribution and Rayleigh distribution based on a tradeoff between the sea clutter modeling accuracy and the computational complexity. Furthermore, in order to better implement CFAR detection, we also use truncated statistic (TS) as a preprocessing scheme and iterative censoring scheme (ICS) for boosting the performance of detector. Finally, we employ a neural network to re-examine the results as the discrimination stage. Experiment results on three GF-3 SAR images verify the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach.