The Ship Detection Using Airborne and In-situ Measurements Based on Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

Maritime accidents around the Korean Peninsula are increasing, and the ship detection research using remote sensing data is consequently becoming increasingly important. This study presented a new ship detection algorithm using hyperspectral images that provide the spectral information of several hundred channels in the ship detection field, which depends on high resolution optical imagery. We applied a spectral matching algorithm between the reflection spectrum of the ship deck obtained from two field observations and the ship and seawater spectrum of the hyperspectral sensor of an airborne visible/infrared imaging spectrometer. A total of five detection algorithms were used, namely spectral distance similarity (SDS), spectral correlation similarity (SCS), spectral similarity value (SSV), spectral angle mapper (SAM), and spectral information divergence (SID). SDS showed an error in the detection of seawater inside the ship, and SAM showed a clear classification result with a difference between ship and seawater of approximately 1.8 times. Additionally, the present study classified the vessels included in hyperspectral images by presenting the adaptive thresholds of each technique. As a result, SAM and SID showed superior ship detection abilities compared to those of other detection algorithms.