A sea-sky-line detection method based on Gaussian mixture models and image texture features

Abstract

This article presents a sea-sky-line detection algorithm in a sea-sky environment for unmanned surface vehicles. Obstacle detection is a vital branch for unmanned surface vehicles on the ocean. Because of the specificity and complexity of the marine navigation environment, we first apply semantic segmentation for marine images. The complete marine scene is divided into sky area, middle mixture area, and seawater area before sea-sky-line detection. Segmenting the marine environment is beneficial for narrowing the obstacle search area, accelerating the rate of obstacle detection, and improving detection accuracy. Therefore, a fast, robust, and accurate sea-sky image segmentation method is urgently required. Therefore, we present a method that lies in a probabilistic graphical model for segmenting marine images. The Gaussian mixture model is introduced as the probability distribution model for the marine image. The sky, middle mixture, and seawater areas are generated by three Gaussian models. The expectation–maximization algorithm is utilized to maximize the log-likelihood function, and the parameters of the Gaussian mixture probability density function that recover the marine image distribution are available after several iterations. Furthermore, to solve the problem of incorrect convergence direction caused by unsatisfactory initialization conditions, the gray level co-occurrence matrix is referenced to initialize the Gaussian components. The coarse segmentation results rely on the gray level co-occurrence matrix and are used to calculate the prior initialization parameters of Gaussian components and obtain the prior distribution information of marine images, which mitigates the harmful influence of poor initialization. The algorithm is tested on a data set consisting of the marine obstacle detection dataset (MODD) public data set and our collected images. The results on this data set demonstrate that the proposed method is more robust and that a superior initialization condition can effectively accelerate the convergence velocity of the iterative process for Gaussian components.