UC San Diego

The development of sophisticated remote sensing sensors is rapidly increasing, and the vast amount of satellite imagery collected is too much to be analyzed manually by a human image analyst. It has become necessary for a tool to be developed to automate the job of an image analyst. This tool would need to intelligently detect and classify objects of interest through computer vision algorithms. Existing software called the Rapid Image Exploitation Resource (RAPIER) was designed by engineers at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (SSC PAC) to perform exactly this function. This software automatically searches for anomalies in the ocean and reports the detections as a possible ship object. However, if the image contains a high percentage of cloud coverage, a high number of false positives are triggered by the clouds. The focus of this thesis is to explore various feature extraction and classification methods to accurately distinguish clouds from ship objects. An examination of a texture analysis method, line detection using the Hough transform, and edge detection using wavelets are explored as possible feature extraction methods. The features are then supplied to a K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) or Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Parameter options for these classifiers are explored and the optimal parameters are determined