Abstract
In this paper, we present an adaptive ship detection method for single-look complex synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. First, noncircularity is analyzed and adopted in ship detection task; besides, similarity variance weighted information entropy (SVWIE) is proposed for clutter reduction and target enhancement. According to the analysis of scattering of SVWIE and noncircularity, SVWIE-noncircularity (SN) decomposition is developed. Based on the decomposition, two components, the high-noncircularity SVWIE amplitude (h) and the low-noncircularity SVWIE amplitude (l), are obtained. We demonstrate that ships and clutter in SAR images are different for h detector and h detector can be effectively used for ship detection. Finally, to extract ships from the background, the generalized Gamma distribution (GD) is used to fit h statistics of clutter and the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) is utilized to choose an adaptive threshold. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated on HH polarization of Alos-2 images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately detect ships in complex background, i.e., ships are close to small islands or with strong noise.
Highlights
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a powerful remote sensing technology, providing valuable information of the Earth surface with 24-hour all-weather sensing capability [1,2,3]
A new adaptive ship detection method based on the SN decomposition is proposed for single-look complex SAR images
similarity variance weighted information entropy (SVWIE) is proposed by adding similarity measure into variance weighted information entropy (VWIE)
Summary
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a powerful remote sensing technology, providing valuable information of the Earth surface with 24-hour all-weather sensing capability [1,2,3]. A method based on the variance weighted information entropy (VWIE) has been proposed [14], which could suppress the background noise and enhance regions of ship from various circumstances without prior knowledge. A combination of VWIE and local contrast information has been proposed to detect ships from complex background [16]. These methods only focus on utilizing intensity of SAR data and discarding the imaginary part. Noncircularity is one of the statistical characteristics that contains the phase information of complex data, which describes the distribution difference between the real and imaginary parts [18,19,20]. Inspired by the advantages of VWIE and noncircularity, we propose a novel method aiming to detect ships in complex background.
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