MOVING SHIP DETECTION AND MOVEMENT PREDICTION IN REMOTE SENSING VIDEOS

Abstract. With the rapid development of remote sensing technology, it is possible to obtain continuous video data from outer space successfully. It is of great significance in military and civilian fields to detect moving objects from the remote sensing image sequence and predict their movements. In recent years, this issue has attracted more and more attention. However, researches on moving object detection and movement prediction in high-resolution remote sensing videos are still in its infancy, which is worthy of further study. In this paper, we propose a ship detection and movement prediction method based on You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO) v3 and Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (SORT). Original YOLO v3 is improved by multi-frame training to fully utilize the information of continuous frames in a fusion way. The simple and practical multiple object tracking algorithm SORT is used to recognize multiple targets detected by multi-frame YOLO v3 model and obtain their coordinates. These coordinates are fitted by the least square method to get the trajectories of multiple targets. We take the derivative of each trajectory to obtain the real-time movement direction and velocity of the detected ships. Experiments are performed on multi-spectral remote sensing images selected on Google Earth, as well as real multi-spectral remote sensing videos captured by Jilin-1 satellite. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our method for moving ship detection and movement prediction. It shows a feasible way for efficient interpretation and information extraction of new remote sensing video data.