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The growing interest in unmanned surface vehicles, accident avoidance for naval vessels and automated maritime surveillance leads to a growing need for automatic detection, classification and pose estimation of maritime objects in medium and long ranges. Laser radar imagery is a well proven tool for near to medium range, but up to now for higher distances neither the sensor range nor the sensor resolution was satisfying. As a result of the mentioned limitations of laser radar imagery the potential of laser illuminated gated viewing for automated classification and pose estimation was investigated. The paper presents new techniques for segmentation, pose estimation and model-based identification of naval vessels in gated viewing imagery in comparison with the corresponding results of long range data acquired with a focal plane array laser radar system. The pose estimation in the gated viewing data is directly connected with the model-based identification which makes use of the outline of the object. By setting a sufficient narrow gate, the distance gap between the upper part of the ship and the background leads to an automatic segmentation. By setting the gate the distance to the object is roughly known. With this distance and the imaging properties of the camera, the width of the object perpendicular to the line of sight can be calculated. For each ship in the model library a set of possible 2D appearances in the known distance is calculated and the resulting contours are compared with the measured 2D outline. The result is a match error for each reasonable orientation of each model of the library. The result gained from the gated viewing data is compared with the results of target identification by laser radar imagery of the same maritime objects.
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