High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) has a vital civilian and military significance for continuous maritime surveillance of activities within exclusive economic zone. However, HFSWR has lower spatial and temporal resolutions and the received signals are strongly polluted by different clutter and background noise. Therefore, ship target detection by HFSWR has become a challenging task. This letter presents an automatic ship target detection algorithm based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT). First, a peak signal-to-noise ratio-based algorithm is proposed to automatically determine the optimal scale of DWT for extraction of ship targets. Second, the high-frequency coefficients of DWT at the optimal scale are processed by a fuzzy set-based method to enhance the useful target information and depress the unwanted background noises. Third, a target-highlighted image is reconstructed by ignoring all the low-frequency coefficients and performing inverse DWT only to the enhanced high-frequency coefficients. Finally, the targets are extracted by adaptive threshold segmentation of the final target-highlighted image. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can automatically extract ship targets effectively for range Doppler images with complex background, and has a better target detection performance than the previous wavelet-based algorithm, thereby providing a new reliable image processing-based method of ship target detection for HFSWR.

The automatic detection of foreground (FG) objects in videos is a demanding area of computer vision, with essential applications in video-based traffic analysis and surveillance. New solutions have attempted exploiting deep neural network (DNN) for this purpose. In DNN, learning agents, i.e., features for video FG object segmentation is nontrivial, unlike image segmentation. It is a temporally processed decision-making problem, where the agents involved are the spatial and temporal correlations of the FG objects and the background (BG) of the scene. To handle this and to overcome the conventional DL models' poor delineation at the borders of FG regions due to fixed-view receptive filed-based learning, this work introduces a Multi-view Receptive Field Encoder-Decoder Convolutional Neural Network called MvRF-CNN.

Fully connected representation learning (FCRL) is one of the widely used network structures in multimodel image classification frameworks. However, most FCRL-based structures, for instance, stacked autoencoder encode features and find the final cognition with separate building blocks, resulting in loosely connected feature representation. This article achieves a robust representation by considering a low-dimensional feature and the classifier model simultaneously. Thus, a new hierarchical subnetwork-based neural network (HSNN) is proposed in this article. The novelties of this framework are as follows: 1) it is an iterative learning process, instead of stacking separate blocks to obtain the discriminative encoding and the final classification results. In this sense, the optimal global features are generated; 2) it applies Moore–Penrose (MP) inverse-based batch-by-batch learning strategy to handle large-scale data sets, so that large data set, such as Place365 containing 1.8 million images, can be processed effectively. The experimental results on multiple domains with a varying number of training samples from ${\sim } 1 \,\,K$ to ${\sim }2~M$ show that the proposed feature reinforcement framework achieves better generalization performance compared with most state-of-the-art FCRL methods.

High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) has become the cornerstone of maritime surveillance because of its low-cost maintenance and coverage of wide area. However, when it comes to the extraction of key areas, such as vessel-target detection and vessel-path tracking, the HFSWR signal is strongly interfered by clutters and noise, which makes maritime surveillance a challenging task. This article proposes a hierarchical key-area perception model for maritime surveillance harnessing range-Doppler (RD) image from HFSWR, Laplacian kernel, a linear classifier (LC), and a subnet-based multilayer representation learning framework (SMRLF). First, a weak LC with a Laplacian kernel is utilized to capture the plausible vessel regions (PVRs). Then, a novel SMRLF is proposed to localize the vessel targets from the PVRs. To handle the noise, a maximum correntropy criterion with variable centers (MCC-VC) is incorporated in the subnet-based learning model. A thorough experimental analysis on cross-domain samples from radar dataset to scene classification dataset shows that the proposed HKPM performs competitively. The model shows a superior performance over most of the state-of-the-art vessel-target detection algorithms with a vessel-target detection accuracy of 94%. The extended analysis on image classification problem proves that the proposed model has great adaptivity and scalability.

High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) can be effectively used to detect ships in the exclusive economic zone. However, the ship signal is concealed and interfered with various clutter and background noise in the Doppler spectrum. In this letter, a range-Doppler (RD) image-based novel ship detection algorithm is proposed by exploiting spatial-frequency information and a unique feature fusion based on the analysis of variance. The algorithm subsumes three successive stages: Stage I—the plausible region of interest is captured, Stage II—the features from different sources are fused into one generalized feature space, and Stage III—an extreme learning machine-based classifier is utilized to localize the ships. Experimental results on challenging HFSWR-RD datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a competitive performance over other ship detection algorithms.

Pattern recognition is significantly challenging in real-world scenarios by the variability of visual statistics. Therefore, most existing algorithms relying on the independent identically distributed assumption of training and test data suffer from the poor generalization capability of inference on unseen testing datasets. Although numerous studies, including domain discriminator or domain-invariant feature learning, are proposed to alleviate this problem, the data-driven property and lack of interpretation of their principle throw researchers and developers off. Consequently, this dilemma incurs us to rethink the essence of networks’ generalization. An observation that visual patterns cannot be discriminative after style transfer inspires us to take careful consideration of the importance of style features and content features. Does the style information related to the domain bias? How to effectively disentangle content and style features across domains? In this article, we first investigate the effect of feature normalization on domain adaptation. Based on it, we propose a novel normalization module to adaptively leverage the propagated information through each channel and batch of features called disentangling batch instance normalization (D-BIN). In this module, we explicitly explore domain-specific and domaininvariant feature disentanglement. We maneuver contrastive learning to encourage images with the same semantics from different domains to have similar content representations while having dissimilar style representations. Furthermore, we construct both self-form and dual-form regularizers for preserving the mutual information (MI) between feature representations of the normalization layer in order to compensate for the loss of discriminative information and effectively match the distributions across domains. D-BIN and the constrained term can be simply plugged into state-of-the-art (SOTA) networks to improve their performance. In the end, experiments, including domain adaptation and generalization, conducted on different datasets have proven their effectiveness.