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Multibeam water column images have been widely used in detecting bubble plume targets in recent years because they can wholly record water column and seabed backscatter strengths. However, strong noises in multibeam water column images cause many issues in target detection, and traditional target detection methods are mainly used in optical images and are less efficient for noise-affected sonar images. To improve the detection accuracy of bubble plume targets in water column images, this study proposes a target detection method based on the bag of visual words (BOVW) features and support vector machine (SVM) classifier. First, the characteristics of bubble plume targets in water column images are analyzed, with the conclusion that the BOVW features can well express the gray scale, texture, and shape characteristics of bubble plumes. Second, the BOVW features are constructed following steps of point description extraction, description clustering, and feature encoding. Third, the quadratic SVM classifier is used for the recognition of target images. Finally, a procedure of bubble plume target detection in water column images is described. In the experiment using the measured data in the Strait of Georgia, the proposed method achieved 98.6% recognition accuracy of bubble plume targets in validation sets, and 91.7% correct detection rate of the targets in water column images. By comparison with other methods, the experimental results prove the validity and accuracy of the proposed method, and show potential applications of our method in the exploration and research on ocean resources.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/rs14143296","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,7,11]],"date-time":"2022-07-11T00:06:21Z","timestamp":1657497981000},"page":"3296","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":12,"title":["Bubble Plume Target Detection Method of Multibeam Water Column Images Based on Bags of Visual Word Features"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"14","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-4834-944X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Junxia","family":"Meng","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Civil Engineering, Anhui Jianzhu University, Hefei 230601, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9434-1388","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jun","family":"Yan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China"},{"name":"Engineering Center for Geographic Information of Anhui Province, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3796-8405","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jianhu","family":"Zhao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"},{"name":"Institute of Marine Science and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,7,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"41","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ecss.2014.04.002","article-title":"A review of oceanographic applications of water column data from multibeam echosounders","volume":"145","author":"Colbo","year":"2014","journal-title":"Estuar. 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