PolSAR ship detection based on the contrast enhancement of polarimetric scattering differences

ABSTRACT

The ship detection in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) mode is a hot topic in recent years, because of the diversity of polarimetric scattering mechanisms between ship targets and sea clutter. To improve the detection performance of ship targets, this paper mainly develops the ship detection method based on the contrast enhancement utilizing the polarimetric scattering difference. The algorithm first enhances the target signal utilizing the scattering difference of the polarimetric coherency matrix between ship targets and sea clutter, and then a simple threshold is applied to distinguish the ship targets from the sea clutter. Finally, real PolSAR datasets recorded by AirSAR system are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed detection method. Compared with other detection methods, experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively improve the detection performance of ship targets.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grants 61621005 and 61671352, and the Key Laboratory of Cognitive Radio and Information Processing, Ministry of Education (Guilin University of Electronic Technology) under grant CRKL160206. The authors are grateful for the website http://airsar.asf.alaska.edu/for providing the AirSAR data for free download.