Fast Ship Detection With Spatial-Frequency Analysis and ANOVA-Based Feature Fusion

Wandong Zhang, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Yimin Yang, Thangarajah Akilan, W. G. Will Zhao, Qingzhong Li, Jiong Niu

Abstract: High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) can be effectively used to detect ships in the exclusive economic zone. However, the ship signal is concealed and interfered with various clutter and background noise in the Doppler spectrum. In this letter, a range-Doppler (RD) image-based novel ship detection algorithm is proposed by exploiting spatial-frequency information and a unique feature fusion based on the analysis of variance. The algorithm subsumes three successive stages: Stage I—the plausible region of interest is captured, Stage II—the features from different sources are fused into one generalized feature space, and Stage III—an extreme learning machine-based classifier is utilized to localize the ships. Experimental results on challenging HFSWR-RD datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a competitive performance over other ship detection algorithms.