The statistical characterization of the sea for the segmentation of maritime images

This paper describes part of an imaging system to indicate possible collision situations between maritime vessels. History shows us that any collision involving a marine craft can have a devastating effect both on human life and the environment. Presented here is a method for the statistical characterization of the sea present in an image and the subsequent segmentation of the image into two regions, sea and object. The characterization process uses statistical measures on histogram data collected from various regions of the image. This leads to a characteristic grey-level range that represents the 'sea'. The grey-level statistics are then used to segment the image into regions that contain sea. The methods introduced here have been shown to work well with images containing differing sized objects with differing sea conditions and levels of illumination.