International Journal of Remote Sensing

ISSN: 0143-1161 (Print) 1366-5901 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tres20

Ship target tracking based on a low-resolution

optical satellite in geostationary orbit

Yong Liu, Libo Yao, Wei Xiong, Tian Jing & Zhimin Zhou

To cite this article: Yong Liu, Libo Yao, Wei Xiong, Tian Jing & Zhimin Zhou (2018) Ship target
tracking based on a low-resolution optical satellite in geostationary orbit, International Journal of
Remote Sensing, 39:9, 2991-3009, DOI: 10.1080/01431161.2018.1437296

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2018.1437296

Published online: 07 Feb 2018.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING, 2018
VOL. 39, NO. 9, 2991–3009
https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2018.1437296

Ship target tracking based on a low-resolution optical

satellite in geostationary orbit
Yong Liua, Libo Yaob, Wei Xiongb, Tian Jinga and Zhimin Zhoua
a
School of Electronic Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha,
Hunan, P.R. China; bInstitute of Information Fusion, Naval Aeronautical and Astronautically University,
Yantai, ShangDong, P.R. China

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Based on the low-resolution geostationary optical satellite for Received 29 June 2017
maritime surveillance, a complete processing algorithm including Accepted 31 January 2018
ship detection and ship tracking is proposed. Potentially ships are KEYWORDS
first detected by a constant false alarm rate processing and a GF-4 geostationary satellite;
morphological filter from the area of water. Image coordinates of maritime surveillance; CFAR
ships are then corrected and transformed by using rational poly- detection; RPCs bias
nomial coefficients and high-resolution shoreline database. In the compensation; multiple
ship-tracking procedure, a convenient motion model based on hypothesis tracking
geographical coordinates is established, and the multiple hypoth-
esis tracking method is used to track ships for further removing
false targets and getting motion states of targets ultimately. Our
algorithm has been tested using GaoFen-4 (GF-4) satellite image
sequences and the automatic identification system messages of
ships. The results of the experiment show that the proposed
algorithm can effectively detect and track ships in complex scenes
and estimate ships’ motion information accurately with the help of
a low-resolution geostationary optical satellite.

1. Introduction
The optical satellite in geostationary orbit (GEO) is a new generation of Earth observa-
tion satellite which has become a hot spot of research in recent years. The GEO satellite
can greatly improve the temporal resolution and coverage and achieve continuous,
nearly real-time, long-term surveillance of an area and get more dynamic information
than traditional satellites. At present, China’s GaoFen-4 (GF-4) satellite, launched on 31
December 2015, has the highest spatial resolution in GEO in the world. A panchromatic
multispectral sensor (PMS) is on board the GF-4 satellite, providing images at a spatial
resolution (50 m) and wide coverage (500 km). GF-4, almost like a video camera, has
high responsiveness and high-revisit observation capabilities. It can not only adjust to
the observation area within a few minutes, but also achieve high-frequency continuous
imaging of the same area (Wang and He 2017). The shortest revisit period of GF-4 can
reach 20 s. Such GEO satellites can play a significant role in many applications, especially
having great potential uses in marine surveillance, which can be used for ship traffic

CONTACT Yong Liu xhliuyong@sina.com School of Electronic Science and Engineering, National University of
Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan 410073, P.R. China
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2992 Y. LIU ET AL.

surveillance, coastal management, and military purposes (Zhang et al. 2017). The spatial
resolution of 50 m seems much lower compared with the high-resolution (≤5 m)
satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), but it’s good enough to track large-size ships in
near real time from space. The image sequences of such GEO satellites can be used to
obtain the motion information about ships, which can assist the decision-making, guide
high-resolution LEO satellites for further observation and identification, and so on. In this
article, we focus on the low-resolution GEO satellites such as GF-4 to demonstrate the
capability of ship tracking for marine surveillance with the help of this type of satellites.
So far, motion detection and estimation from remote-sensing images have been
studied in many published articles (Kääb and Leprince 2014). A single image from
QuickBird (Pesaresi, Gutjahr, and Pagot 2008; Liu, Yamazaki, and Vu 2011), WorldView-
2 (Salehi, Zhang, and Zhong 2012; Gao et al. 2014), etc., has been successfully used to
extract information about moving vehicles, which is based on that there is a time lag
between the acquisition times of panchromatic (Pan) and multispectral (MS) images on
the same high-resolution platform generally, making it possible to detect the motion of
targets. However, there are big spectral differences between spectrally neighbouring
bands, and the capability of target detection is different in different bands, so we cannot
guarantee that the target can be detected in all bands. Targets can also be tracked
within the time-lag between space-borne along-track stereo data. The WorldView-2
multi-sequence images (Meng and Kerekes 2012), Panchromatic Remote-sensing
Instrument for Stereo Mapping (PRISM) stereo images (Charalambous et al. 2015), and
other images of small video satellite have been tested for ship tracking within a short
time interval, but the long revisit period and limited coverage of low-orbit satellite
restrict their use for maritime surveillance to some extent. Thanks to the capability of
the GEO satellite for continuous imaging, we can use the time-series images for ship
tracking in the article. As shown in Figure 1, there are two ships moving in opposite
directions in five image chips of GF-4 (size: 128 × 128, revisit interval: 186 s) in the near-
infrared (NIR) band sequentially, and basic information about two ships is shown in the
right of this figure. In such sequential images of the low-resolution GEO satellite, a ship
generally has a few pixels and little feature information, which can be regarded as a
weak point target in the complex sea background. Compared with traditional video
sequences, the imaging interval of the GEO satellite is long, from tens of seconds to a
few minutes per frame. At the same time, due to the long distance away from the Earth,
a small attitude control error of the GEO platform will cause a large position bias
between the target corresponding to pixel point and image position. Satellite images
are also affected by light and other factors, resulting in radiation inconsistencies in
neighbouring frames. These new characteristics and problems cannot be directly solved
by traditional visual target tracking method. Image sequences of the GEO satellite are

Figure 1. Two ships in five sequential chips of GF-4 and some basic information about ships.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING 2993

more suitable for decomposition into single-frame processing and then inter-frame
association processing. At present, the research of ship detection based on single-
frame image is mainly in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from low to high
resolution (El-Darymli et al. 2013), while the research on ship detection of optical images
is limited and mainly for high-resolution images. The detection method focuses on the
sea–land segmentation and feature extraction, mainly based on histogram statistics,
significance detection, feature description (Corbane et al. 2010), deep learning (Tang
et al. 2015), and other methods. Among them, the application of deep learning makes
ship detection really practical, but it may not be suitable for low-resolution images.
Based on the characteristics of the low-resolution GEO satellite, combined with the
background of marine surveillance, this article presents a complete processing algorithm
for ship tracking.

2. Methodology description
The workflow of the proposed method is summarized in Figure 2. The complete
processing chain is divided into three parts: ship detection, position adjustment, and
ship tracking. In the first part, through the land and cloud masking, we can get the
region of interest (ROI). Constant false alarm rate (CFAR) algorithm is used for ship

Figure 2. Flow chart of the proposed ship detection and tracking approach.
2994 Y. LIU ET AL.

detection, and a morphological processing is used to further reduce false targets. In the
second part, we use the shoreline database and rational polynomial coefficients (RPCs)
to correct the system errors of location and convert the image coordinates of ships into
geographical coordinates with high accuracy. In the tracking part, the results of detec-
tion are input to multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) tracker for target tracking, and then
the tracker outputs the dynamic information about ships.

2.1. Ship detection

2.1.1. Image preprocessing
In order to mask land and clouds, a preprocessing of images is performed, making the
following detection stage easier and more accurate. Compared with the sea, the pixel
intensity of clouds and land is higher. If the image in the Pan band is provided only, we
can use the threshold segmentation directly to extract clouds and land. If MS images are
provided, we can make full use of the spectral characteristics of different objects. In this
article, we use the normalized difference water index (NDWI) (McFeeters 1996) to extract
the ROI.
ρG  ρNIR
NDWI ¼ ; (1)
ρG þ ρNIR

where ρG ; ρNIR are the reflectance of green and NIR band. NDWI is based on that the
reflectance of water is stronger in the green band, while it is weaker in the NIR band. We
can also see that ship detection is more suitable in the NIR band due to the stronger
contrast between the ship target and surrounding water, so we select the image I in the
NIR band for ship detection. The binary image B of water area is gotten using the
threshold Twater ,


1; ðNDWIÞðx; yÞ <Twater
Bðx; yÞ ¼ ; (2)
0; ðNDWIÞðx; yÞ  Twater

where ðx; yÞ is any pixel position. The binary image F of non-water area can be obtained
by a logical NOT operator of B. However, the non-water area may also contain ships
since ship’s pixel intensity is higher than the background, so we cannot mask directly. In
this article, according to the difference between the density distribution of cloud, land,
and ship, the binary image obtained by segmentation is processed by block operation.
We count the ratio of 0 in each block of B. If the ratio is greater than a threshold, we
regard this block as cloud or land, and all numbers of the block should be set to 0.
Otherwise, all numbers are set to 1. The image I0 after masking is expressed as
I0 ðx; yÞ ¼ Iðx; yÞB0 ðx; yÞ; (3)

where B0 is the binary image after block operation. The masked image I0 is used for ship
detection eventually.

2.1.2. CFAR algorithm

At present, the resolution of GEO satellites is far less than that of low-orbit imaging
satellite, so ships are small and weak in the image of GEO satellites. At the same time,
the intensity distribution of sea background is not uniform in some regions. A constant
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING 2995

Figure 3. Sliding window used for CFAR detection.

threshold for segmentation is not often a good choice, which results in a large number
of false ships (low threshold) or many undetected ships (high threshold). Therefore, the
adaptive threshold detection algorithm maintaining a CFAR is necessary. CFAR proces-
sing has been widely used in SAR (El-Darymli et al. 2013), infrared, and other images for
target detection. To ensure a CFAR, the threshold is calculated based on clutter char-
acteristics. We adopt two-parameter CFAR detection technique, which is based on the
assumption that the clutter follows the probability density function of Gaussian distribu-
tion and it is suitable for remote-sensing images in low resolution. The detector is
applied using a sliding window centred around the target window, as sketched in
Figure 3. The background window is used to estimate the test statistic μB and σB ,
which are the mean and standard deviation of pixel intensities in the background
window, respectively. A guard window is considered around the target window to
prevent target pixels contributing to the test statistic. Detection is assessed if mean
intensity μT over all intensities in the target window is greater than a threshold λcfar ,
λcfar ¼ μB þ Kcfar σB ; thus the decision rule can be described as
>
μT λcfar ¼ μB þ Kcfar σB ; (4)
<
where Kcfar controls the false alarm rate. The sizes of three windows can be selected
empirically. The size of the target window is generally set to 1, the size of the guard
window generally equals the pixel length of the largest ship, and the size of the
background window can be set to two times the size of the guard window. After
CFAR detection, morphological processing is used to remove too large or too small
target.

2.2. Coordinate transformation and adjustment

2.2.1. RPCs bias compensation
Once the image coordinates of ships are extracted from CFAR detection, the ground
coordinates of ships can be estimated using the rational function model (RFM) with
RPCs. RFM is a general model independently of the sensor, which is high-precision fitting
of the strict geometric imaging model. For the ground-to-image transformation, the RFM
is defined as (Oh and Lee 2015)
2996 Y. LIU ET AL.

y ¼ qq12 ðu;v;wÞ
ðu;v;wÞ
; (5)
x ¼ qq34 ðu;v;wÞ
ðu;v;wÞ

with
u ¼ ðφ  φo Þ=φs ; v ¼ ðλ  λo Þ=λs ; w ¼ ðh  ho Þ=hs ;
(6)
y ¼ ðl  lo Þ=ls ; x ¼ ðs  so Þ=ss

where ðu; v; wÞ and ðx; yÞ are the normalized ground and image coordinates, respec-
tively. ðφ; λ; hÞ is geodetic latitude, longitude, and ellipsoidal height, and ðl; sÞ are the
line (row) and sample (column) in image coordinates. φo ; λo ; ho ; lo ; so and φs ; λs ; hs ; ls ; ss
are the offset and scale factors for latitude, longitude, height, line, and sample, respec-
tively. q1 ; q2 ; q3 , and q4 are rational functions composed of a numerator and denomi-
nator, having a 20-term cubic form as follows:
qðu; v; wÞ ¼ a1 þ a2 v þ a3 u þ a4 w þ a5 vu þ a6 vw þ a7 uw þ a8 v2 þ a9 u2 þ a10 w2 þ
;
a11 uvw þ a12 v3 þ a13 vu2 þ a14 vw2 þ a15 v2 u þ a16 u3 þ a17 uw2 þ a18 v2 w þ a19 u2 w þ a20 w3
(7)
where a1  a20 are the model coefficients.
As ships are at sea, the elevation h can be set to 0 approximately. The corresponding
ground coordinates can be calculated using the inverse transformation of Equation (5)
which can be solved iteratively using Taylor series expansions. However, the initial
ground coordinates are inaccurate for direct geo-referencing of images because of the
systematic error of RPCs. As the geostationary satellite is far away from the Earth, the
overall positioning accuracy is low and cannot meet the application requirement of
maritime surveillance. This problem can be resolved by means of indirect methods,
which use ground control points (GCPs). However, GCPs are usually obtained manually
or semi-automatically, which require major effort to be collected. To correct the error of
RPCs, we use the world vector shorelines (WVS) database in global self-consistent
hierarchical high-resolution shoreline (GSHHS), which is a high-precision (90 m) coastline
database and denotes data with geodetic longitude, latitude locations on the WGS-84
ellipsoid. It is unnecessary to perform orthorectification and accurate registration of pixel
displacement between image sequences beforehand, and it only needs to calculate the
compensation parameters of image coordinate using GSHHS. In order to correct the
system error, the image error compensation model is introduced. The commonly used
bias-compensated RPC model is affine transformation, which is expressed as
l 0 ¼ e0 þ e 1 l þ e 2 s
; (8)
s 0 ¼ f 0 þ f 1 l þ f2 s

where ðl0 ; s0 Þ and ðl; sÞ are image coordinates obtained from RPCs and tie points,
respectively, ðei ; fi Þ; ði ¼ 0; 1; 2Þ are the transformation parameters. By inverse transfor-
mation of Equation (5), the latitude and longitude of four corners of the imaging region
can be obtained, which is used for selecting the map layer of WVS in the imaging region.
The selected WVS is projected into the image space using the provided RPCs and
projection Equation (5). It is difficult and not robust to match the edge of the binary
image F with the projected coastline directly because the projected points of coastline
are much sparser than the points of extracted edge and the extracted edge may not be
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING 2997

Figure 4. Template matching using GSHHS and PRCs.

accuracy enough. Instead, we use the projection of enclosed areas (islands in WVS) to
compute region mask and then match templates with binary image F over the search
region, as depicted in Figure 4. The normalized cross-correlation (NCC) is utilized to
measure similarity, and NCC in the position ði; jÞ is expressed as

P
M0 P
N0
Pðm; nÞFðm þ i; n þ jÞ
m¼1 n¼1
ρði; jÞ ¼ sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi (9)
PM0 P N0 M0 P
P N0
P2 ðm; nÞ F2 ðm þ i; n þ jÞ
m¼1 n¼1 m¼1 n¼1

where P is the window of the projected image (size: M0  N0 ). The maximum value of
NCC determines the position of the template image in the image to be matched. In the
template matching, a matching window position in the projected image is referred to as
ðl0 ; s0 Þ, and the corresponding matching location in the satellite image is referred to as
ðl; sÞ. ðl; sÞ and ðl0 ; s0 Þ are two point pairs.

2.2.2. RANSAC algorithm

Given more than three reliable matching point pairs over the entire image, we can
estimate the affine parameters accurately. However, many point pairs obtained by image
matching are incorrect, and we cannot proceed to rectification with so many erroneous
point correspondences as above, so the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm
(Marsetič, Oštir, and Fras 2015; Fischler and Bolles 1981) is used to remove outliers and
automatically select a subset of the matching point set. The steps to solve the affine
transformation parameters using RANSAC are as follows:

(1) Randomly select three point pairs to calculate affine transformation parameters
and then take all matching points to compute distances based on current affine
transformation. Store the inliers whose distance errors are less than a threshold.
(2) Repeat random sampling for K times and get the largest numbers of inliers. Use
least squares algorithm to solve the best affine transform parameters.

The image coordinates of ships are bias-compensated using the above-estimated

affine parameters. Furthermore, the geographic coordinates are estimated using
updated RPCs.
2998 Y. LIU ET AL.

2.3. Ship tracking

2.3.1. Modelling of ship
For marine surveillance using the geostationary satellite, we need not only to detect
ships, but also to track ships and get their dynamic information. An appropriate motion
modelling is required before ship tracking. Usually, the track of the ship mainly includes
the great circle track and the rhumb-line track. The great circle track is the shortest track,
so it is economical. However, due to the frequent change of course in navigation, in
practice, the piecewise rhumb-line tracks are used to approximate the great circle track.
Therefore, this article mainly studies the rhumb-line track. In the plane rectangular
coordinate system, the linear motion is the simplest, so the research on target tracking
is based on Cartesian coordinate system. In practice, the latitude and longitude are
usually used to describe the ship position information. If we want to establish the
motion state of a target in plane coordinates, we can transform the geographic coordi-
nates into plane coordinates by projection, such as Mercator projection most commonly
used in ship navigation, Universal Transverse Mercator projection, and so on. However,
the area span after long time tracking may result in the projection plane deformation
and affect the precision of prediction of the target state. It is also convenient to use
geographic coordinates for tracking without coordinate conversion. Therefore, this
article describes the target state in geographic coordinate and the state at frame k is
defined as

xk ¼ ðλk ; vklon ; φk ; vklat ÞT ; (10)

where λk ; φk and vklon ; vklat represent the position and speed components along longitude
and latitude directions, respectively. The unit of latitude, longitude, and course is the
degree (°). The unit of distance, time, and velocity are nautical miles (nm), hours, and
knots (kn, kn = nm hour−1), respectively. Given the speed vk and the course ck over
ground (relative to true north), it can be obtained that


vklon ¼ vk sin ck
: (11)
vklat ¼ vk cos ck

Middle latitude sailing is simpler and more convenient to be used in the dead reckoning
of a rhumb-line track (Sölver and Marcus 1958), so we choose it for track prediction. The
state transition model of middle latitude sailing from one point ðλ1 ; φ1 Þ to the other
point ðλ2 ; φ2 Þ is expressed as


φ2 ¼ φ1 þ v1lat T=a
; (12)
λ2 ¼ λ1 þ v1lon T secðφmid
1 Þ=a

where T is the time interval and a is the equatorial arc length with one degree, which is
60 nm (°)−1. φmid
1 is the middle latitude which is approximately the mean latitude,
φmid
1 ¼ ðφ2 þ φ 1 Þ=2 ¼ φ1 þ v1lat T=a=2. The state transition model is generally
described as

xk ¼ ftrans ðxk1 Þ þ Gk1 vk1 ; (13)

 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING 2999

where ftrans ðÞ is state transition function and Gk1 and vk1 are the process noise matrix
and process noise, respectively. We assume vk1 follows a bivariate Gaussian distribution
with zero mean and covariance Bk ,
 2 
σv 0
Bk ¼ ; (14)
0 σ2v

where σv is the process noise standard deviation. Derived from Equation (12), the state
transition equation in our article is
2 3 2 3 2 2 3
λk λk1 þ vk1
lon
Tk1 secðφmidk1 Þ=a k1 Þ=a=2
Tk1 secðφmid 0
6 vlon 7 6 lon
vk1 7 6 Tk1 0 7
xk ¼ 6 k 7
4 φk 5 ¼ 4
6 7þ6
5 4
7vk1 ;
φk1 þ vk1
lat
Tk1 =a 0 2
Tk1 =a=2 5
vklat lat
vk1 0 Tk1
(15)
with Tk1 ¼ tk  tk1 and φmid
k1 ¼ φk1 þ vk1 Tk1 =a=2, where tk1 and φk1 are the time
lat mid

stamp and the middle latitude at frame k  1, respectively.

Although the temporal resolution of GEO satellites is high, it’s difficult to extract the
feature information about ships due to its low spatial resolution. Therefore, this article
only considers the position information of detection results for tracking in each frame.
The measurement equation of position information is expressed as
zk ¼ Hk xk þ wk ; wk , Nð0; Rk Þ; (16)
 
1 0 0 0
Hk ¼ ; (17)
0 0 1 0
 
σ2p 0
Rk ¼ ; (18)
0 σ2p

where zk is the measurement of location, Hk is the observation matrix, w k is the

measurement noise which follows the Gaussian distribution NðÞ with zero mean and
covariance Rk , and σp is the standard deviation of positioning both in longitude and in
latitude, which can be regarded as the standard deviation of positioning error after
correction of position offset.

2.3.2. MHT framework

After ship detection, there are a large number of false targets due to broken clouds,
waves, and other interference, so it needs effective data association algorithm to solve
multi-target tracking under this strong clutter. As single-frame data association has high
association uncertainty, MHT tracking framework is selected in order to ensure the
accuracy of data association. MHT is a multiple target tracking algorithm, which has
been widely used in many tracking applications. A key strategy in MHT is to use multi-
frame measurements for data association, through delaying a decision by keeping
multiple hypotheses to resolve data association ambiguities. MHT involves track initia-
tion, track maintenance, and track termination in a unified framework, which is more
prominent in the case of low detection probability, large clutter density, and dense
targets (Reid 1979).
3000 Y. LIU ET AL.

In this article, we use the track-oriented MHT algorithm (Blackman 2004). MHT uses
the structure of track trees to manage targets. A track tree corresponds to a target, each
node on the track tree corresponds to a measurement (including dummy measure-
ments), and each path from the root node to the leaf node corresponds to a track, of
which only one track corresponds to the real track of the target. At each frame, a new
track tree is constructed for each measurement in order to account for a new target. The
previously existing track is extended by spawning a separate branch for each measure-
ment within its gating area. If no measurements associated with the track, an empty
node is spawned. MHT uses the track score to evaluate each track. The track score can
be defined as the cumulative log-likelihood ratio. According to Bayesian theory, the
score of track j at frame k, Sj ðkÞ can be expressed in the following recursive form,

Sj ðkÞ ¼ Sj ðk  1Þ þ ΔSj ðkÞ; (19)

where ΔSj ðkÞ is the increments of the score, which is calculated as (Ren et al. 2014).
!
pffiffiffiffiffiffi  d2 ; i > 0
PD 2
ln
ΔSj ðkÞ ¼ f ð2πÞ ðλn þλf Þ jSjk j
p=2 ; (20)
lnð1  PD Þ; i¼0

where PD is the probability of detection and λn and λf are the spatial density of new
targets and clutter, respectively. Sjk is the covariance which is estimated by a Kalman
filter, p is the state dimension, and d is the Mahalanobis distance. In the above equation,
i > 0 means track j is associated with the measurement i at time k while i ¼ 0 means
track j is associated with the dummy measurement. Each measurement can initialize a
new track and the initial score of each track is Sj ð1Þ ¼ λn =λf . The gating distance
between current measurement position and estimated position at previous time needs
to satisfy the constraint,
 
j
D zki ; Hk1 xk1  vmax Tk1 ; (21)

where vmax is the maximum speed and DðÞ denotes the distance between two geo-
graphic coordinates, which is defined as

D½ðλi ; φi ÞT ; ðλj ; φj ÞT  ¼ a  arccos½sin φi sin φj þ cos φi cos φj cosðλj  λi Þ: (22)

As Equation (15) is nonlinear, we use the first-order extended Kalman filter to predict,
update the motion state, and then update the track score. The number of ships detected
by different frames of images is changing dynamically, and some false targets are
contained. According to the multi-frame movement of targets, we use track manage-
ment to discover new targets and remove false targets. A logic method for track
management is used in this article. Track management includes track initiation, track
maintenance, and track termination. If the logic requirement that M detections out of N
scans fall in the subsequent gates is satisfied, the track becomes a confirmed or active
track. Otherwise, it is discarded. If no detection has been validated in the past L, most
recent frames or the speed of a target is unfeasible (too low), and a confirmed track will
be terminated.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING 3001

3. Experimental results
To verify the proposed ship-tracking algorithm based on the GEO satellite, five GF-4 PMS
observations are selected for use in this article. The observation area is located in the
East China Sea, and the imaging time in coordinated universal time (UTC) is 9 March
2017 from 03:47:24 to 03:59:47. The revisit period is 186 s, and the total time interval is
743 s. Each data have five spectral bands, and the size of each band is 10,240 × 10,240
with a resolution of 50 m. The level of all data is level1A, which is not corrected
geometrically, but the RPCs data are supplied. We select the green band and NIR
band to extract the ROI. The threshold Twater is set to 0.1, and the block size is set to
64 × 64, and the proportional threshold is 1%. The intensity image of NDWI and the
binary image of NDWI after threshold segmentation are shown in Figure 5(a,b), respec-
tively. The image in the NIR band selected for ship detection and the masked image
after block processing are shown in Figure 5(c,d), respectively. From Figure 5, it can be
seen that the preprocessing method can effectively mask the clouds and land and
extract the potential area of ships, so that the false targets caused by land and clouds
can be reduced and the efficiency of ship detection can be improved greatly.

Figure 5. Image preprocessing for land and cloud masking. (a) Intensity image of NDWI. (b) Binary
image of NDWI after threshold segmentation. (c) Image in the NIR band. (d) Masked NIR image after
block processing.
3002 Y. LIU ET AL.

Figure 6. Automatically selected map layer of GSHHS in the imaging area.

Meanwhile, the accuracy segmentation of land is beneficial to template matching in

position adjustment.
Figure 6 shows the automatically selected map layer of coastline in the imaging area
using RPCs. The selected coastline is a set of polygons which can generate the region
mask for image matching and RPCs bias compensation.
The point pairs in the first frame after image matching and matching point pairs after
RANSAC processing are shown in Figure 7, where ‘Template’ and ‘Image’ mean the
locations of projected templates and the locations of matching points in the satellite
image, respectively. The number of iteration in RANSAC processing is set to 100, and the
distance threshold is set to 2. As shown in Figure 7(b), the distance between two point
sets is 10–60 in the sample and 10–30 in the line, respectively. The position accuracy
without GCPs is 1–5 km calculated by 50 m per pixel while the geo-location accuracy of
satellites in LEO is about 10 m in the range without GCPs (Salehi, Zhang, and Zhong
2012), so it’s necessary to correct the position error in the GEO satellite image. From the
comparison of two subfigures in Figure 7, we can see that RANSAC has a good
performance and can remove the erroneous point pairs effectively.
This article selects two typical regions (size of region 1 and region 2: 2048 × 2048) to
validate ship detection and tracking algorithm. The region 1 is an inhomogeneous
region, and the lower left corner is brighter than other sea areas in images. The region
2 contains much bright ocean waves, which can cause a lot of false targets easily after
ship detection. The target window, guard window, and background window of CFAR
processing are set to 1, 10, and 20, respectively, and Kcfar ¼ 4. As the resolution of GF-4 is
50 m and ships with length below 50 m are more difficult to be detected and it is also
hard to verify the authenticity of detection of these ships, ships whose sizes are lower
than 2 pixels are discarded in morphological processing to reduce false targets. We
mainly assess the detection performance of ships whose lengths are above 50 m. The
number of ships detected in each frame is different, while the true number of ships
keeps constant basically. In order to validate the results of ship detection, the real-time
automatic identification system (AIS) data in two regions at imaging time is used by
linear interpolation. AIS is an automatic tracking system mainly used for collision
Figure 7. Point pairs matching in the first frame. (a) Point pairs after image matching. (b) Point pairs after RANSAC processing.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING
3003
3004 Y. LIU ET AL.

avoidance on ships, which can provide rich information about ships, such as unique
identification, position, course, and speed. In order to validate the detection results,
here, we compute the following statistical measures:

Correctness ¼ NTPNþN
TP

NTP ; (23)
FP
Completness ¼ NTP þNFN

where NTP , NFP , and NFN are the number of ships correctly detected, incorrectly
detected, and missing, respectively, by means of AIS information verification and manual
identification. The correctness and completeness are complementary and need to be
interpreted simultaneously. Table 1 reports the two calculated measures in five frames in
the study regions. The detection results in the first frame in two regions are shown in
Figure 8(a,b), and the image coordinates of targets after ship detection in five frames are
shown in Figure 8(c,d).
In the two complex scenes, we can see that the performance of CFAR detection is
satisfied in region 1, and the false alarm rate is high in region 2 mainly due to the
inference of ocean waves which are similar to ships. The missing targets in ship detec-
tion are small-size ships, whose lengths are 50–70 m by the analysis of unassociated AIS
messages, while ships whose lengths are above 70 m can be well detected. The total
completeness in two regions is above 80%, which is high. If we want to improve the
correctness for balance, the relative thresholds in CFAR and morphological processing
should be improved properly.
In MHT-tracking algorithm, we set σp ¼ 0:002 and σv ¼ 0:01 nm hour−2, and the
scan number of MHT is set to 3. For track management, we use the three-of-four test to
confirm tracks and tracks are terminated after three missed detections. Figure 8(e,f)
shows the geographical coordinates after coordinate transformation, where ‘AIS’ means
AIS data, and ‘RFM’ means the geographical coordinates gotten by RFM, and ‘Corrected’
means the geographical coordinates gotten by corrected RFM using GSHHS. As can be
seen from Figure 8(e,f), the accuracy of coordinates after RPCs correction is improved
greatly and the corrected coordinates are close to the AIS interpolated coordinates.
Figure 8(g,h) shows the tracking results of our algorithm, where a red line represents a
track, and ‘o’ is the start of a track, and ‘+’ is the end of a track.
We also use the correctness and completeness to assess the tracking performance,
where NTP , NFP , and NFN represent the number of ships correctly tracked, incorrectly
tracked, and missing, respectively. The tracking measures are shown in Table 2, where

Table 1. Ship detection performance of the experiment.

Region Frame NTP NFP NFN Correctness (%) Completeness (%)
1 1 95 41 13 69.85 87.96
2 97 57 11 62.99 89.81
3 96 49 12 66.21 88.89
4 96 58 12 62.34 88.89
5 94 46 14 67.14 87.04
2 1 49 152 20 24.38 71.01
2 48 216 21 18.18 69.57
3 49 169 20 22.48 71.01
4 48 194 21 19.83 69.57
5 48 209 21 18.68 69.57
Total 720 1191 165 37.68 81.36
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING 3005

Figure 8. Detection and tracking results in two regions. (a, b) Results of CFAR detection in the first
frame in region 1 and region 2, respectively. (c, d) Detection results in five frames. (e, f) Position
adjustment and coordinate transformation. (g, h) Tracking results of MHT.
3006 Y. LIU ET AL.

Table 2. Ship-tracking performance of the experiment.

Region NTP NFP NFN NAIS Correctness (%) Completeness (%)
1 93 5 15 45 94.90 86.11
2 48 8 21 28 85.71 69.57
Total 141 13 36 73 91.56 79.66

NAIS represents the number of ships verified by AIS messages in the whole tracking (each
frame of a track is associated with AIS).
From Tables 1 and 2, it can be seen that there are many false targets after two-
parameter CFAR detection. Through MHT-tracking algorithm, false targets can be
reduced effectively, and the number of true targets can be estimated accurately. The
73 ships verified by AIS messages are used to assess the motion state estimation, and
the ground truth length of ships is shown in Figure 9(a). We can also see that ships
whose lengths are above 70 m are well identified in ship tracking. Figure 9(b,d) shows
the comparisons of motion state information between the tracking results and AIS
messages. The average absolute error of motion estimation information about ships in
detail is reported in Table 3. We can see that the position is well estimated, and the
mean of position error is 330 m. The position error is mainly caused due to the position
offset between GSHHG and ground truth, the error of AIS interpolation, and the model

Figure 9. Comparisons of the motion estimation information with AIS messages. (a) Ship length in
AIS. (b) Absolute error of geographic location. (c) Comparison of speed. (d) Comparison of course.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING 3007

Table 3. Average error of motion estimation.

Frame Location error (m) Speed error (kn) Course error (°)
1 349.08 \ \
2 323.02 0.74 2.63
3 334.36 0.52 2.37
4 338.93 0.35 2.39
5 320.25 0.29 2.77
Total 333.13 0.48 2.54

error of RPC bias compensation. However, the accuracy of geographic position can meet
the tracking requirement because the distance between ships is larger than 500 m
generally. The speed range is 4–18 kn (approximately 2–9 m s−1), covering slow- and
fast-moving ships in Figure 9(c). It can be seen that the speed and course estimation are
accurate. The average error of speed and course estimated by our method are 0.48 kn
(approximately 0.25 m s−1) and 2.54° separately. The speed is estimated with more
accuracy with the increase of speed as shown in Figure 9(c). The average error of
speed decreases with the increase of time, while the course error is unsteady with the
time increasing. This is because the course of a track is more easily interfered by the
measures which are not very accurate. Due to the low spatial resolution of GF-4, the size
of ships is hard to be estimated accurately, which is not assessed and included in this
experiment.

4. Conclusion
This article proposes a complete processing algorithm for ship tracking based on
the low-resolution GEO optical satellite such as GF-4. The proposed algorithm is
well verified by the experimental sequences of GF-4 and AIS data, which shows the
great potential of the GEO satellite for maritime surveillance. In this article, we use
NDWI for land and cloud masking and use CFAR processing to well solve the
detection problem of weak targets in complex sea background, and our algorithm
can effectively detect large-size ships from the remote-sensing images with a high
detection rate. We propose a simple but useful RPC bias compensation method by
using the public shoreline database, which improves the accuracy of geo-reference
greatly without orthorectification of images beforehand. A novel modelling of a
ship in geographic coordinate is utilized in MHT tracking, which is used to further
reduce false targets and estimate the motion information. The tracking algorithm
can meet the demand for continuous monitoring and tracking of ships with a
strong engineering application value, and it can further be used for data fusion
with high-resolution imaging satellites and other detailed identification satellites
in LEO.
However, we can recognize that there is still potential for improvement in ship
detection and the geo-location accuracy. Any improvement in reducing the false
alarm and position error can increase the accuracy of tracking. At the same time, it
also needs to improve the tracking performance in more complex scenes by using
limited characteristics of ships. Those will be the focus of our future research.
3008 Y. LIU ET AL.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant
No.91538201. The authors thank China Centre for Resources Satellite Data and Application for
providing GF-4 data sets, and GSHHS database was obtained from https://earth.esa.int/web/nest/
downloads/sample-data. In addition, they would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their
valuable and helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 91538201].

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