Patent Document ID: 10121078
Application ID: 14401180
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for detecting foreign objects in a region of interest in a maritime environment, the method comprising: receiving image data indicative of a sequence of successively acquired images of the region of interest, analyzing each image in said sequence of images to determine candidate image pixel points of interest in the generated data indicative of the interpolated image data; processing the generated data indicative of the candidate image pixel points in the image data identifying the candidate image pixel points having adjacently located coordinates in two or more of the consecutive images, and generating grouping data indicative of a plurality of groups of said adjacently located candidate image pixel points; and processing the grouping data, said processing the grouping data comprising identifying spatio-temporal correlation between the adjacently located image pixel points in each group of candidate points for determining for at least some of said groups of candidate points micro tracks formed by the locations of the grouped points in the two or more consecutive images and being indicative of formation of short term tracks in the received images, and generating micro tracks data indicative thereof, wherein said analyzing of the sequence of images comprises: applying to each image under analysis of the sequence of images one or more decimation functions and generating respective decimated image data; computing a signal to clutter ratio for each pixel in said image under analysis and for each pixel in said decimated image data; processing the generated signal to clutter ratios and generating therefrom one or more respective binary image data for said image under analysis, and for said respective decimated image data according to an adaptive thresholding criterion; and interpolating binary image data associated with said decimated image data, and generating data indicative of interpolated image data.