Moving Target Shadow Detection Method Based on Improved ViBe in VideoSAR Images

The video synthetic aperture radar (VideoSAR) has the high frame-rate imaging capability, which can perform the ground moving target detection. The moving target often leaves the shadow in the sequence of the VideoSAR images, which can indirectly detect the moving target by detecting its shadow. In view of the high false alarm rate and high missed detection rate of existing algorithms, this article proposes a moving target shadow detection method based on the improved ViBe in the VideoSAR images. First, the shadow information and local contrast information of the VideoSAR image are extracted by using the super-pixel segmentation technology, which can achieve the background reconstruction. Besides, the ViBe algorithm is improved by modifying the definition of the distance in the image pixel classification, adding the image pixel screening, and performing the morphological filtering, which is more suitable for the moving target shadow detection in VideoSAR images. Finally, by jointly extracting the regions of interest from multiple frames' detection results, most of the false alarms are suppressed, which can obtain the excellent performance in detecting the moving target shadow. The experimental results tested on the VideoSAR data released by the Sandia National Laboratories are shown to validate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, for which the detection rate of moving target shadows reached 97.66%, with only 8 false alarms.