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The Application of GF-1 Imagery to Detect Ships on the Yangtze River

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Abstract

Various satellite data are currently used to detect ships on the sea surface. However, no study on the use of Gaofen-1 (GF-1) data to monitor ships on the surface of inland rivers has been reported. Therefore, we proposed a method to extract inland river-surface ships from GF-1 imagery. The Normalized Differential Water Index was calculated to enhance the contrast between water and non-water areas after the preprocessing procedure. The multi-resolution segmentation method and object-oriented classification rule sets were used to detect the ships in the image. Results show that most of the ships, whose length-to-width ratio ranges from 3.0 to 7.2, could be identified correctly regardless of their size. The results also indicate that detecting ships on inland rivers using GF-1 imagery is feasible.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51509030; 41571336), Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province (Grant No. 2015020081) , the National Key Technology R &D Program (Grant No. 2015BAG20B04) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 3132015006). We wish to thank China Centre For Resource Satellite for providing GF-1 data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Information Institute, Dalian Maritime University, No.1 Linghai Road, Dalian, 116026, China

    Bingxin Liu, Ying Li, Qiang Zhang & Liang Han

  2. Navigation College, Dalian Maritime University, No.1 Linghai Road, Dalian, 116026, China

    Bingxin Liu & Ying Li

Authors
  1. Bingxin Liu
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  2. Ying Li
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  3. Qiang Zhang
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  4. Liang Han
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Correspondence to Bingxin Liu.

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Liu, B., Li, Y., Zhang, Q. et al. The Application of GF-1 Imagery to Detect Ships on the Yangtze River. J Indian Soc Remote Sens 45, 179–183 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12524-016-0575-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12524-016-0575-4

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