Efficient Horizon Line Detection Using an Energy Function

Evgeny Gershikov, Chaim Baskin

Abstract: In this work we propose a new method for horizon line detection in marine environment images captured by either visible light or infrared cameras. A common method for horizon line detection is based on edge detection and Hough transform. This method has serious drawbacks when the horizon is not a clear straight line or when the image contains other straight lines.Our method replaces the Hough transform with a more sophisticated method based on an image operator called seam. A seam is an optimal 8-connected path of pixels in a single image going from left to right or vice versa. An energy function is used and the seam optimality is defined by the steepest energy descent. We compare the accuracy and relative speed of our method to existing methods for a group of test images. These images are real-life photographs at different spatial resolutions, levels of blurriness, and varying contrast and brightness conditions. Our experiments show that our method increases the accuracy of horizon detection compared to other similar techniques.