Space non-cooperative target detection based on improved features of histogram of oriented gradient

Traditional non-cooperative target detection methods are mostly based on different matching templates which are well-designed with additional prior information. Moreover, one single template can be merely used to detect objects with similar shapes and structures, causing low applicability in detecting non-cooperative targets whose prior information are usually unknown. In order to solve those problems and inspired by the object estimation technique based on normed gradient, an object detection algorithm using improved features of histogram of oriented gradient is proposed. A training data set composed of natural images and target images is first built manually. Secondly, we extract the modified HOG information in the labeled regions to preserve detailed structures of the local features. Then, the cascaded support vector machine is used to train the model autonomously, which does not require prior information. Finally, we design several tests using the trained model to detect targets from the testing images. Numerous experiments demonstrate that the detection rates of the proposed method are 94.5% and 94.2% respectively when applied to testing sets with 4 953 and 100 images. The time consumption of extracting one image is about 0.031 s while it is robust to object rotation and illumination under certain condition.