Vessel Detection Based on SDGSAT-1’s Thermal Infrared and Low-Light Data

The Sustainable Development Goals Science Satellite-1 (SDGSAT-1) is equipped with both low-light and thermal infrared imagers, which can detect infrared radiation and weak light information emitted by vessels. Compared to similar products, its spatial resolution has undergone a significant improvement. Existing remote sensing vessel detection methods only consider the use of single-source data for vessel detection, fail to effectively utilize the complementary information in multisource data, and have difficulty processing the complex vessel shapes of high-resolution satellite data, resulting in unsatisfactory detection results. In view of the sparse distribution of vessels at sea, this article proposes a new vessel target detection method using SDGSAT-1 high-resolution thermal infrared and low-light satellite data. Specifically, guided filtering is used to fuse thermal infrared and low-light data, the background and foreground are separated by partial sum of tensor core norms (PSTNN) model, and then the ordering points to identify the clustering structure (OPTICS) clustering algorithm and intercluster merging are used for detection. This article established a vessel dataset by choosing Shanghai Port, Hong Kong Port, and the Gulf of Mexico and then applied the algorithm. The detection accuracy and recall rate were found to be 97.67% and 97.80% respectively, which were significantly superior to other algorithms. This algorithm overcomes the complex background noise in the dataset and achieves good detection results.