A New Method for Automatic Detection of ShipTargets in SAR Images

Abstract

Automatic interpretation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is one of the most interesting and important application fields in image processing. Focusing on the medium resolution SAR images and combining with the previous algorithms, a novel technique to detecting ship targets from coastal regions in a fully automatic way is proposed in this paper. This paper presents current progress made on the detection model. In this method, sea regions and land regions were detected firstly according to the corresponding decimation algorithm and thresholding technique. Then the land regions can be masked out from the SAR image based on mapping principle of the image datas. And In order to obtain a high reliability and robustness, the processed processing chain detects possible targets by first searching in parallel for bright spots, i.e. potential ship bodies. Therefore, the sea image with ship targets is processed with maximum entropic algorithm, and we can extract the regions of interest which contain candidate ship targets. And the authentic ship targets were eventually detected by utilizing the method of feature matching. Finally, for later classification and recognition we calculate the feature parameters of every ship. Experimental results on 50 different SAR images are given to demonstrate that this method can automatically detect ship targets from SAR images with high efficiency.