## 5 Conclusions and Future Work
The experimental results also  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Metrics** & **Methods** & **Seq1** & **Seq2** & **Seq3** & **Seq4** & **Seq5** & **Seq6** & **Seq7** & **Seq8** & **Seq9** & **Average** \\ \hline
**ME** & **THF/BHF** & 0.0826 & 0.1341 & 0.3606 & 0.0545 & 0.2172 & 0.2433 & 0.0383 & 0.0126 & 0.0882 & 0.1368 \\  & **2 DME** & 0.3133 & 0.4516 & 0.6720 & 0.2610 & 0.5216 & 0.2858 & 0.0815 & 0.0097 & 0.1849 & 0.3090 \\  & **2 DO** & 0.4017 & 0.4194 & 0.3531 & 0.7029 & 0.7139 & 0.4183 & 0.0710 & 0.6084 & 0.2778 & 0.4729 \\  & **MSS** & 0.4589 & 0.4241 & 0.1508 & 0.0517 & 0.3813 & 0.3370 & 0.1094 & 0.5073 & 0.1365 & 0.2838 \\  & **IMFS** & 0.0048 & 0.0032 & 0.0191 & 0.0170 & 0.0243 & 0.0289 & 0.0030 & 0.0018 & 0.0009 & 0.0114 \\  & **IFCM** & 0.0405 & 0.0047 & 0.0522 & 0.0091 & 0.0462 & 0.0899 & 0.0217 & 0.0022 & 0.0014 & 0.0298 \\  & **CVM** & 0.0018 & 0.0257 & 0.0954 & 0.0105 & 0.2143 & 0.0523 & 0.0597 & 0.0016 & 0.0013 & 0.0514 \\  & **HCST** & 0.1285 & 0.3937 & 0.1069 & 0.0062 & 0.1635 & 0.2187 & 0.0315 & 0.0025 & 0.0011 & 0.1170 \\  & **Proposed** & **0.0016** & **0.0023** & **0.0031** & **0.0045** & **0.0104** & **0.0047** & **0.0018** & **0.0012** & **0.0005** & **0.0033** \\ \hline
**RAE** & **THF/BHF** & 0.3978 & 0.6005 & 0.3553 & 0.3297 & 0.3099 & 0.4198 & 0.9341 & 0.3456 & 0.7458 & 0.4932 \\  & **2 DME** & 0.1705 & 0.8735 & 0.9747 & 0.2953 & 0.1065 & 0.0064 & 0.8817 & 0.2447 & 0.9999 & 0.5062 \\  & **2 DO** & 0.2294 & 0.3887 & 0.8650 & 0.9629 & 0.9869 & 0.5350 & 0.8243 & 0.7093 & 1.0000 & 0.7224 \\  & **MSS** & **0.1152** & 0.1918 & 0.1198 & 0.1551 & 0.0856 & 0.1168 & 0.9049 & 0.7077 & 1.0000 & 0.3774 \\  & **IMFS** & 0.1731 & 0.1817 & 0.1905 & 0.9930 & 0.9962 & 1.0000 & 0.5285 & 0.6018 & 0.3077 & 0.5525 \\  & **IFCM** & 0.2196 & 0.2784 & 0.4267 & 0.2558 & **0.0208** & 0.0525 & 0.8772 & 0.5963 & 0.4223 & 0.3500 \\  & **CVM** & 0.2607 & 0.2865 & 0.1570 & 0.3008 & 0.1106 & 0.2683 & 0.2836 & 0.1527 & 0.5982 & 0.2687 \\  & **HCST** & 0.1667 & 0.2809 & 0.1878 & 0.1103 & 0.3830 & 0.3252 & 0.1175 & 0.6994 & **0.0217** & 0.2547 \\  & **Proposed** & 0.1203 & **0.1523** & **0.0992** & **0.0874** & 0.0213 & **0.0040** & **0.0204** & **0.0092** & 0.1112 & **0.0695** \\ \hline
**MAR** & **THF/BHF** & 0.5220 & **0.0000** & 0.4620 & 0.3540 & 0.4480 & 0.5440 & 0.8900 & 0.5070 & **0.0000** & 0.4141 \\  & **2 DME** & 0.2160 & 0.7560 & 1.0000 & 0.0460 & 0.4120 & 0.4320 & 0.6850 & 0.5320 & 0.6412 & 0.5245 \\  & **2 DO** & 0.4480 & 0.4740 & 0.7260 & 0.6640 & 1.0000 demonstrate that the proposed method can work stably for ship target with unknown brightness, variable quantities, sizes, and shapes. However, although the proposed method has achieved considerable detection results, the method is based on the assumption that ship targets are viewed as uniform regions under the sea background in thermal infrared images due to long imaging distance, so it cannot work well for segmenting the whole ship target with uneven intensities in near-distance or near-infrared imaging. Therefore, combining the proposed method with region growing method [47] to develop a high-quality ship segmentation algorithm for ship targets with uneven intensities is one important direction in our future studies. Besides, the proposed method can accurately detect both bright and dark ship targets by directly adding bright and dark ship target maps in most cases but may cause some false alarms in the ship target detection submerged in dense sun-glint clutter, as Figure 14j6 illustrates. Therefore, combining multi-frame verification [48] or deep multi-feature fusion [27; 49] strategy to recognize ship target submerged in heavy sun-glint clutter is our another important research direction. [PERSON] and [PERSON] proposed the ship target detection method. [PERSON] conducted the experiments and wrote the manuscript under the supervision of [PERSON] and [PERSON]. [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON] assisted in the database selection and performed the comparison experiments.