To visually detect sea-surface targets, the objects of interest must be effectively and rapidly isolated from the background of sea-surface images. In contrast to traditional image detection methods, which employ a single visual feature, this paper proposes a significance detection algorithm based on the fusion of multi-visual features after detecting the sea-sky-lines. The gradient edges of the sea-surface images are enhanced using a Gaussian low-pass filter to eliminate the effect of the image gradients pertaining to the clouds, wave points, and illumination. The potential region and points of the sea-sky-line are identified. The sea-sky-line is fitted through polynomial iterations to obtain a sea-surface image containing the target object. The saliency subgraphs of the high and low frequency, gradient texture, luminance, and color antagonism features are fused to obtain an integrated saliency map of the sea-surface image. The saliency target area of the sea surface is segmented. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified. The average detection rate and time for the sea-sky-line detection were 96.3% and 1.05 fps, respectively. The proposed method outperformed the existing saliency models on the marine obstacle detection dataset and Singapore maritime dataset, with mean absolute errors of 0.075 and 0.051, respectively.

To address the problem of unclear images affected by occlusion from fog, we propose an improved Retinex image enhancement algorithm based on the Gaussian pyramid transformation. Our algorithm features bilateral filtering as a replacement for the Gaussian function used in the original Retinex algorithm. Operation of the technique is as follows. To begin, we deduced the mathematical model for an improved bilateral filtering function based on the spatial domain kernel function and the pixel difference parameter. The input RGB image was subsequently converted into the Hue Saturation Intensity (HSI) color space, where the reflection component of the intensity channel was extracted to obtain an image whose edges were retained and are not affected by changes in brightness. Following reconversion to the RGB color space, color images of this reflection component were obtained at different resolutions using Gaussian pyramid down-sampling. Each of these images was then processed using the improved Retinex algorithm to improve the contrast of the final image, which was reconstructed using the Laplace algorithm. Results from experiments show that the proposed algorithm can enhance image contrast effectively, and the color of the processed image is in line with what would be perceived by a human observer.