Article

Journal of Vibration and Control

2022, Vol. 28(23-24) 3664–3675

A feature extraction method of © The Author(s) 2021

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ship-radiated noise based on mathematical DOI: 10.1177/10775463211038123

morphological filtering
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Zhao-xi Li1, Ya-an Li1 and Kai Zhang2

Abstract
In order to extract feature of ship signal more effectively, we propose a new approach for mathematical morphological
filtering based on the morphological features. Mathematical morphological filter is a new nonlinear filter, which can
effectively extract the edge contour and shape characteristics. The stimulation signal is processed by mathematical
morphological filtering of different structure elements, which confirms the effect of morphological filtering on suppressing
noise and preserving the nonlinear characteristics. Using flat structure element, the measured ship-radiated noise signals
are processed by average filter, and the filtered signals are analyzed on the frequency spectrum. Compared with other
filters, the result shows that the mathematical morphological filtering can successfully extract the effective information
from the ship-radiated noise signals.

Keywords
Feature extraction, mathematical morphological filtering, structure element, particle swarm optimization, envelope
spectrum entropy

1. Introduction
In the current development of underwater acoustic target
detection technology, ship target detection has always been
a key research direction. Because ship-radiated noise in-
cludes physical laws of the ship’s navigational state, self-
vibration, and the interaction between the hull and the water
body, therefore the effective extraction characteristic of ship
signal has become a problem worthy of study.
Ship signal has characteristic of nonlinear, non-
Gaussian, and non-stationary. So, the linear algorithm
has some limitations in the feature extraction of ship signal
(Wang and Zeng, 2014; Zhang, 2009). Many research
studies have discussed the application of nonlinear ap-
proaches including the application of wavelet transform
(Zhang et al., 1997), Hilbert–Huang transform (Huang
et al., 1998), independent component analysis (Hyvarinen
and Oja, 2000), etc.(Li, 2020; Li et al., 2019a; Li et al.,
2019b; Wu and Huang, 2004) and have achieved certain
results in recent years. However, the computation of non-
linear feature is relatively complicated. So, it is necessary to
simplify the computation on the basis of ensuring the
stability of the extracted feature and adopt a more concise
method to extract the nonlinear characteristic of ship signal,
so as to reduce the computation time.
Mathematical morphological filtering is an important
nonlinear filter based on mathematical morphological
transformation. Mathematical morphological transformation
decomposes a complex signal into various parts with
physical meaning and separates it from the background while
maintaining its main morphological characteristics. It first
appeared and developed in image processing field (Haralick
et al., 1987). In the last few years, some scholars have in-
troduced it into the field of one-dimensional signal pro-
cessing (Maragos, 1987; Maragos and Schafer, 2003) and
have begun application in the preprocessing method for the
transient waveform in power system (Liu et al., 2004), fault
diagnosis (Yu et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2007), denoising of
EEG and ECG signals (Nishida et al., 1999; Yan et al., 2002),
and underwater acoustic detection (Li et al., 2021a; Li et al.,
2021b; Wang et al., 2019).
According to the characteristics of ship signal and the
principle of mathematical morphology, a method for
1
School of Marine Science and Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical
University, Xi’an, China
2
Department of Computer & Information of Science & Engineering,
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Received: 26 March 2021; accepted: 21 July 2021
Corresponding author:
Li Yaan, School of Marine Science and Technology, Northwestern
Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China.
Email: liyaan@nwpu.edu.cn
Li et al.
extracting ship signal features based on mathematical
morphological filtering is proposed. First, according to the
different effects of different structure elements in signal
suppression and feature extraction, the optimal structure
element is selected for further analysis. Then, according to
the filtering performance of different mathematical mor-
phological filters, the appropriate filter is selected, and
particle swarm optimization is introduced to determine the
optimal structure element length. Finally, by analyzing the
measured signal and comparative experiments with other
filters, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and fluctuation-based
dispersion entropy are used as evaluation index to verify the
feasibility and superiority of this filter.
2. Methods
2.1. Mathematical morphology
Let f ¼ 0; 1; 2,/, N  1 and g ¼ 0; 1; 2,/, M  1, re-
spectively, denote the discrete function f ðnÞ and gðmÞ, where
N ≥ M , f ðnÞ is one-dimensional discrete signal. gðmÞ is
structure element. The dilation of f ðnÞ by gðmÞ is defined by
f Å gðnÞ ¼ max½f ðn  mÞ þ gðmÞ (1)
The effect of dilation is that the signal rises as a whole, and
the sharp angle is eliminated from the above signal, which
can play a unilateral filtering role.
The erosion of f ðnÞ by gðmÞ is defined by
f Θ gðnÞ ¼ min½f ðn þ mÞ  gðmÞ (2)
The effect of erosion is the overall decline of the signal, the
sharp angle is eliminated from the signal, and the filtering
effect is produced.
In practice, opening and closing, like erosion and dilation, are
dual transformations. The opening of f ðnÞ by gðmÞ is defined by
ðf +gÞðnÞ ¼ ðf ΘgÅgÞðnÞ (3)
and the closing of f ðnÞ by gðmÞ is defined by
ðf •gÞðnÞ ¼ ðf ÅgΘgÞðnÞ (4)
2.2. Morphological filter
Morphological filter is a nonlinear transformation tech-
nology, which is mainly used to locally modify the geo-
metric characteristics of the signal. It performs feature
extraction on shape information of input signal through
structure element of appropriate size. Morphological filter is
combination of the four basic operations. The specific
definition is as follows:
2.2.1. Morphological opening–closing (OC) and closing–
opening (CO) filter. Cascading opening and closing
3665
operation to process the signal can also achieve the purpose
of simultaneously suppressing noise. According to the
different cascading order, morphological opening–closing
and closing–opening filter can be constructed. The OC and
CO filter are, respectively, defined as follows
OCFðf ðnÞÞ ¼ ðf +g•gÞðnÞ (5)
COFðf ðnÞÞ ¼ ðf •g+gÞðnÞ (6)
2.2.2. Average filter. It can be seen from the effects of the
opening and the closing operation, these two methods are
used to filter the signal, and then results are averaged re-
spectively. So, AVG filter plays a smoothing role that can be
used to suppress the noise and defined as follows
AVGðf ðnÞÞ ¼ ½OCFðf ðnÞÞ þ COFðf ðnÞÞ
(7)
2
2.3. Particle swarm optimization
Particle swarm optimization (Eberhart and Kennedy, 2002)
is an intelligent swarm-optimized method with good global
optimization ability of parameters, which can avoid low
efficiency and local optimum. Therefore, we adopt particle
swarm optimization (PSO) to adaptively optimize the
structure element parameters to improve the effect of feature
extraction. The flowchart for optimizing structure element
parameter is shown in Figure 1. The detailed process is
defined as follows:
1. Initialize PSO parameters and determine fitness
function. The larger the number of particles and
evolution generations are, the more accurate the op-
timized parameters are. But it takes more time, so the
evolution generation and the number of particles are
usually selected as 50–100. In this step, acceleration
factors c1 and c2 are set as 2, random factor λ 2 ½0, 1,
weight coefficient ω is set as 0.6, evolutionary gen-
eration is 50, population size is 100, and particle
update velocity and particle swarm optimization range
are ½20, 20 and ½1, 10, respectively. Since the
envelope spectrum entropy can effectively measure
the periodic transient sequence, the envelope spec-
trum entropy is used as the fitness function to assess
the separation characteristics. The basic principle is as
follows:
Hilbert transformation of input signal xðtÞ is defined by
Z
1 ∞ xðτÞ
hðtÞ ¼ HðxðtÞÞ ¼ dτ (8)
π ∞ t  τ
xðtÞ and hðtÞ formed the new complex signal
3666 Journal of Vibration and Control 28(23-24)

results are used as the initial particles to continue

updating.
3 Continue the iterative process, the individual local
extremum pio and the population global extremum goi
are updated by comparing the particle of fitness
values.
4 According to equation (12), update particle position xi ðtÞ
and velocity vi ðtÞ
(    
vi ðt þ 1Þ ¼ ωvi ðtÞ þ c1 λ pio  xi ðtÞ þ c2 λ goi  xi ðtÞ
xi ðt þ 1Þ ¼ xi ðtÞ þ vi ðt þ 1Þ
(12)

where i is ith particle in the population, t is the current

iteration number, ω is the inertia weight, c1 and c2 are ac-
celeration factors, and λ is random factor. vi 2 ½vmax ,vmax  is
the speed of particle movement and pi and pg are, re-
spectively, the historical optimal position of individual
particle and whole particle.

5 When the maximum evolutionary generation is calcu-

lated, the iteration stops, and the optimal structure ele-
ment length L and the minimum envelope entropy are
output. Otherwise, return step (2) continues the loop until
the stop condition is satisfied.
Figure 1. Particle swarm optimization flowchart.
3. Performance analysis of morphological
zðtÞ ¼ xðtÞ þ jhðtÞ (9) filter
Envelope signal is defined as In order to verify the morphological filter, we use Lorenz
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi signal as input signal for the following simulation ex-
EðtÞ ¼ jzðtÞj ¼ x2 ðtÞ þ h2 ðtÞ (10) periment. Figure 2, respectively, shows Lorenz signal and
noisy Lorenz signal. The SNR of noisy Lorenz signal
Then, the obtained envelope signal is transformed by FFT, is 10 db.
namely, the envelope spectrum. Combining envelope
spectrum analysis with Shannon entropy, namely, envelope
spectrum entropy and defined as
3.1. Analyze the impact of the different structure
element shapes
8 XN
>
> He ¼  i¼1 pi •In pi We commonly used structure element shapes including
<
triangular type, semi-circular type, and flat type and
HX ðiÞ (11)
>
> compare the filtered results of four basic morphological
: pi ¼ PN
j¼1 HX ðjÞ
operations on the same noisy Lorenz signal under the same
length, same height, and different shapes of structure ele-
where HX ðiÞ is the envelope spectrum of xðtÞ and He is ment. Figure 3 shows the filtering results of flat structure
envelope spectrum entropy. According to the knowledge of element. Figure 4 reveals the filtering results of semi-
information theory, the stronger the sparse feature of the circular structure element. Figure 5 illustrates the filtering
signal is, the smaller the envelope entropy is. Specifically, results of triangular structure element.
the filtering result preferably obtains the boundary in- From the description of Figures 3–5, four basic oper-
formation of ship signal, so that extracted ship signal ations of morphology for processing input signal with three
features are more obvious. types of structure elements, and the results, are basically the
same. The difference is that processed signals are close to
2 Generated a random initial particle and velocity, the the original signal with different details. For example,
particle is corresponding to the parameter L of structure Figure 3(a) described dilation result of flat structure ele-
element, and calculated the fitness value. The calculation ment. The filtered signal has flat geometric characteristics,
Li et al. 3667

Figure 2. The input signal. (a) Lorenz signal and (b) the noisy Lorenz signal.

Figure 3. Flat structure element. (a) Dilation operation; (b) erosion operation; (c) opening operation; and (d) closing operation.

which is close to the original signal. It can be seen from
Figure 4(a) that dilation result of semi-circular structure
element, the filtered signal is close to the original signal with
semi-circular geometric feature, and in the process of di-
lation with triangular structure element, the smoothing of
signal is approximate to the original signal based on the
triangular geometric feature in Figure 5(a). Because the flat
structure element has the characteristics of simple structure
and higher calculation efficiency, so we use flat structure
element for further analysis.
3.2. Analyze the filtering characteristics of
morphological filters
To research the filtering characteristics of different morpho-
logical filter, flat structure element with height of H ¼ 0 and
width of L ¼ 5 is used to calculate the amplitude–frequency
responses of OCF, COF, and AVG. The results are shown in
Figure 6. It can be found from Figure 6 that three moro-
phological filters have low-pass characteristics, which are
suitable for the noise reduction of low-frequency noise.
3668 Journal of Vibration and Control 28(23-24)

Figure 4. Semi-circular structure element. (a) Dilation operation; (b) erosion operation; (c) opening operation; and (d) closing
operation.

Figure 5. Triangular structure element. (a) Dilation operation; (b) erosion operation; (c) opening operation; and (d) closing operation.
Li et al.
Figure 7 is the amplitude–frequency response of OCF,
COF, and AVG at different structure element length. From
Figure 7, with the increase of structure element length, the
normalized frequency will gradually decrease, that is, when the
length L ¼ 32, normalized frequency is minimum. Figure 7(c)
shows that the frequency response amplitude of AVG is close
to the input signal. So, we use AVG for further research.
3.3. Analyze the impact on the length of structure
element
Structure element length is the main factor affecting the
morphological filter. If the selected length is too long, it may
cause the impact signal to be filtered as noise. If the selected
length is too short, a lot of noise will remain and the de-
modulation of signal is difficult. According to Section 2.3, we
Figure 6. Amplitude–frequency characteristics of three mor-
phological filters.
Figure 7. Amplitude–frequency characteristics. (a) OCF; (b) COF; and (c) AVG. Note: AVG: average filter.
3669
use PSO to determine the length of structural element.
Figure 8(a) is the curve of envelope spectrum entropy of
input signal obtained by PSO with evolutionary generation.
From Figure 8(a), when the envelope spectrum entropy
reaches 0.001311, it tends to be stable, and the corresponding
optimal structure element length is 10. Figure 8(b) is the
result of AVG filtering of input signal by selecting the length
of structure element. Figure 8(c) is the amplitude spectrum of
filtered signal. Figure 8(d) describes the envelope spectrum
analysis result of filtered signal. By observing Figure 8(c) and
Figure 8(d), we found that the noise is weakened.
4. Experiment application
4.1. Feature extraction using AVG filter
To demonstrate the validity of the proposed filter, four types
of measured ship signals (National Park Service, 2020)
(expressed by S-1, S-2, S-3, and S-4, respectively) are
analyzed by AVG filter. The size of each ship signal is 4500.
The sampling rate of each ship signal is 44100 Hz. The four
types of ship signals are normalized, and obtained results
are described in Figure 9. Figure 9 depicts the large am-
plitude distribution of ship signals at different frequencies.
Therefore, it is difficult to identify the ship characteristic.
We use flat structure element to conduct AVG filtering on
four kinds of ship signals. The filtered results are shown in
Figure 10. From Figure 10, amplitude of four types of ship
signals after AVG filter is reduced. Figure 11 displays the
frequency spectrum. As can be seen from Figure 11, low
frequencies are highlighted after the four types of ship
signals pass through the AVG filter.
4.2. Comparison experiment
In order to show the superiority of AVG filter, we made a
comparison between median filter and Hilbert demodulation.
3670 Journal of Vibration and Control 28(23-24)

Figure 8. Analyze results. (a) Variation curve of envelope spectrum entropy to evolutionary generation; (b) filtered signal; (c) amplitude
spectrum; and (d) envelope spectrum.

Figure 9. Four types of ship signals.

Li et al. 3671

Figure 10. Average filter filtering results.

Figure 11. The frequency spectrum.

3672 Journal of Vibration and Control 28(23-24)

Figure 12. Hilbert demodulation.

Figure 13. Median filter.

Li et al. 3673

Table 1. Comparison result.

Input signals SNR of input signals/(db) SNR of AVG filter/(db) SNR of Hilbert demodulation/(db) SNR of median filter/(db)
S-1 30.386 17.8202 4.7042 2.1134
S-2 13.6043 6.3534 4.2301 2.1671
S-3 30.6322 10.1071 4.7792 4.8683
S-4 8.9562 8.8226 4.0623 0.3690
Notes: SNR: Signal-to-noise ratio; AVG: average filter..

Figure 14. FDE. (a) The original result; (b) the result of AVG filter; (c) the result of Hilbert demodulation; and (d) the result of median
filter. Notes: FDE: fluctuation-based dispersion entropy; AVG: average filter.

Figure 12 illustrates the filtering results of Hilbert de-
modulation. From Figure 12, the results of Hilbert de-
modulation are not real. The filtering results of median
filter are described in Figure 13. From the filtering results,
the waveform after median filter is relatively sharp, the
amplitudes of four types of ship signals are very small, and
the influence of noise still exits. So, AVG has the best
effect of filter.
5. The evaluation index of AVG filter
5.1. Signal-to-noise ratio
The SNR (Chen et al., 2012) of ship signal is an indicator to
evaluate the quality of AVG filter. The larger SNR, the better
the effect of filter. Table 1 compares SNR of four types of
ship signals and SNR of ship signal after AVG filter, Hilbert
demodulation, and median filter. The results indicated that
3674
the SNR after AVG filtering is improved, which verifies the
effectiveness of the AVG filter.
5.2. Fluctuation-based dispersion entropy
The original the signal with higher noise level, the higher
the entropy value. It shows that the signal has a higher
complexity due to the influence of noise. After noise re-
duction processing, the complexity of the signal is reduced
due to the filter, and its entropy value will also be reduced.
We randomly selected 72 sample data for each ship signal to
calculate fluctuation-based dispersion entropy (FDE)
(Rostaghi and Azami, 2016). The FDE of four types of ship
signals, FDE of AVG filtering results, FDE of Hilbert de-
modulation results, and FDE of median filtering results are
shown in Figure 14. Figure 14(a) indicated that the FDE of
S-2, S-3, and S-4 cannot distinguish directly. From
Figure 14(c), the FDE of S-3 and S-4 fluctuated from 0.4 to
0.5. In Figure 14(d), the FDE of S-2 and S-3 fluctuated from
0.35 to 0.4. The FDE value in Figure 14(b) is the smallest after
AVG filtering. In summary, FDE of four types of ship signals
after AVG filter can be distinguished.
6. Conclusions
For purpose of eliminating noise and extracting valuable
characteristics of ship signals, we use four basic morpho-
logical operations to construct the AVG filter, which can use
predetermined structure elements to match ship signals.
Through the stimulation experiment, we analyzed the in-
fluence of structure element shape, structure element length,
and the selection of morphological operations on the filter
performance. Then, a new method of ship signals based on
mathematical morphological filtering is proposed in this
article. The conclusion can be drawn as follows:
1. We introduce the mathematical morphological filter-
ing into the feature extraction of ship signal and prove
AVG filters out interference noise better than Hilbert
demodulation and median filter.
2. Compared the effect of different shapes of structure el-
ements on the stimulation signal; the experimental results
show the flat structure element effectively extracts the
characteristics of ship signal than other structure element.
3. The PSO algorithm is used to adaptively optimize the
structure element parameters of AVG filter in order to
improve the feature extraction effect.
4. Evaluate the pros and cons of the filtering effect by
SNR and FDE of input signals and filtered signals. The
SNR of the proposed filtering results presented sig-
nificant improvement. The complexity of ship signals
is reduced due to the filtering of noise, and FDE value is
also reduced accordingly. Therefore, the AVG filter can
better extract the effective characteristics of ship signals
from complex marine background noise.
Journal of Vibration and Control 28(23-24)
Author contributions
Zhaoxi Li designed the project and wrote the manuscript; Yaan Li
and Kai Zhang help to revise the manuscript. All co-authors re-
viewed and approved the final manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with re-
spect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support
for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article:
Authors gratefully acknowledge the supported by National Natural
Science Foundation of China (No. 11874302, No.11574250 and
No.51179157).
ORCID iD
Zhao-xi Li  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3480-0722
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