Moving ships detection via the trajectory feature extraction from spatiotemporal slices of infrared maritime videos

•An ship target detection algorithm is proposed by utilizing the unique trajectory feature in the spatiotemporal slice. It is mainly implemented by extracting the linear edge of the target trajectory texture in the spatiotemporal slice.•The adaptive expansion linear modeling method can solve the problem of fracture and adhesion of the linear edge of trajectory texture and achieve better target trajectory detection.•An adaptive iterative dilation method for target region extraction is proposed, which combines displacement consistency of the target. The algorithm utilizes the displacement information and distance information of target trajectory pixels to achieve accurate target trajectory region localization. In practical application scenarios, maritime infrared videosoften contain different types of sea state scenes, weather conditions, shooting time, shooting distance, etc. In these different types of maritime videos, ship targets have great differences in size, grayscaledistribution and contrast, which brings difficulties to ship target detection.At the same time, the diversity of fluctuation, grayscale distribution and reflected light of the sea surface will bring unpredictable interference noise to ship target detection.How to accurately detect ship targets in complex and changeable maritime infrared videos is a challenging task and research focus.The key to achieving accurate ship detection is to extract robust target features that can effectively distinguish targets from all thebackground noises.In this paper, a novel infrared video ship target detection algorithm based on spatiotemporal slice target trajectory features extraction is proposed. The algorithm is very sensitive to real targets and has excellentanti-noise ability.The main innovation of the algorithm is to extract the target trajectory feature from the spatiotemporal slice of the sequence image and generate the trajectory feature map.We use the trajectory texture formed by the ship target in the spatiotemporal slice to extract the target feature, which can greatly suppress the background noise.The adaptive dilation linear model algorithm can effectively detect the target trajectory line in the spatiotemporal slice. In addition, we also make full use of the gradient of the target trajectory line to distinguish different target trajectory pixels, and propose an adaptive iterative dilation target region localization algorithm combined with gradient consistency.For object segmentation, we cal