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In this letter, we propose a novel computational model for automatic ship detection in optical satellite images. The model first selects salient candidate regions across entire detection scene by using a bottom-up visual attention mechanism. Then, two complementary types of top-down cues are employed to discriminate the selected ship candidates. Specifically, in addition to the detailed appearance analysis of candidates, a neighborhood similarity-based method is further exploited to characterize their local context interactions. Furthermore, the framework of our model is designed in a multiscale and hierarchical manner which provides a plausible approximation to a visual search process and reasonably distributes the computational resources. Experiments over panchromatic SPOT5 data prove the effectiveness and computational efficiency of the proposed model.
Bi et al. (Fri,) studied this question.