Quantitative analysis of the improvement in omnidirectional maritime surveillance and tracking due to real-time image enhancement

Abstract

Omnidirectional camera systems are used to supplement RADAR in tracking small craft close in to the ship in a maritime environment. They can simultaneously track multiple targets to provide a more complete situational awareness. Due to their wide field of view the targets may be only a few pixels each. The improvement in tracking small boats, after using real-time image enhancement techniques to mitigate the atmospheric blurring and loss of contrast, is evaluated for several common tracking techniques. A differential GPS and geo-alignment of the cameras is used to create a ground truth for objective comparison.