A man-made object detection algorithm based on contour complexity evaluation

作者：Xu, Guili^*; Wang, Zhengbing; Cheng, Yuehua; Tian, Yupeng; Zhang, Chao

来源：Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, 2017, 30(6): 1931-1940.

DOI：10.1016/j.cja.2017.09.001

• Complexity evaluation
• Contour chain code
• Contour detection
• Man-made object detection
• Salient contour

Man-made object detection is of great significance in both military and civil areas, such as search-and-rescue missions at sea, traffic signs recognition during visual navigation, and targets location in a military strike. Contours of man-made objects usually consist of straight lines, corner points, and simple curves. Motivated by this observation, a man-made object detection method is proposed based on complexity evaluation of object contours. After salient contours which keep the crucial information of objects are accurately extracted using an improved mean-shift clustering algorithm, a novel approach is presented to evaluate the complexity of contours. By comparing the entropy values of contours before/after sampling and linear interpolation, it is easy to distinguish between man-made objects and natural ones according to the complexity of their contours. Experimental results show that the presented method can effectively detect man-made objects when compared to the existing ones.

• 出版日期2017-12
• 单位南京航空航天大学