Single-channel Synthetic Aperture Radar Images Research Articles

A review of recent advance of ship detection in single-channel SAR images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an active microwave imaging sensor for high-resolution observation, with the ability of working in all-weather and all-day. Recently, SAR images have been widely used in many fields. Among them, ship detection in single-channel SAR images is a significant part of civilian and military fields. This article first discusses the characteristic of SAR images and the detectability of ships, then summarizes the recent advance of traditional and deep learning-based methods used for ship detection in single-channel SAR images. In addition, the characteristics and existing problems of various methods are discussed and their future development trends are predicted. Aiming at the problems of the large amount of calculation, multi-scale and densely docked ship detection in single-channel SAR images, an improved deep learning-based detection algorithm is proposed, which has achieved excellent performance on the SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD).

Ship Detection in PolSAR Images Based on a Modified Polarimetric Notch Filter

Ship detection based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is one of the key applications for maritime security. Compared with single-channel SAR images, polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data contains the fully-polarized information, which better facilitates better discriminating between targets, sea clutter, and interference. Therefore, many ship detection methods based on the polarimetric scattering mechanism have been studied. To deal with the false alarms caused by the existence of ghost targets, resulting from azimuth ambiguities and interference from side lobes, a modified polarimetric notch filter (PNF) is proposed for PolSAR ship detection. In the proposed method, the third eigenvalue obtained by the eigenvalue–eigenvector decomposition of the polarimetric covariance matrix is utilized to construct a new feature vector. Then, the target power can be computed to construct the modified PNF detector. On the one hand, the detection rate of ship targets can be enhanced by target-to-clutter contrast. On the other hand, false alarms resulting from azimuth ambiguities and side lobes can be reduced to an extent. Experimental results based on three C-band AIRSAR PolSAR datasets demonstrated the capability of the proposed PNF detector to improve detection performance while reducing false alarms. To be specific, the figure of merit (FoM) of the proposed method is the highest among comparative approaches with results of 80%, 100%, and 100% for the tested datasets, respectively.

Mixture Based Superpixel Segmentation and Classification of SAR Images

Abstract: The proposed approach suggests a mixture-based super pixel segmentation technique for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. SAR is a radar system used to generate 2D or 3D representations of objects like landscapes. This method utilizes SAR image amplitudes and pixel coordinates as features. Super pixels are large irregular-shaped regions obtained through oversegmentation of an image. While super pixel segmentation methods are commonly designed for colour images, this approach adapts a finite mixture model (FMM) for single-channel SAR images. By employing finite mixture models, the pixels are clustered into super pixels. Following the super pixel segmentation, the method employs a hierarchical decision tree clustering algorithm for classifying different land covers, such as climate monitoring and natural resources exploitation. The decision tree algorithm creates a dendrogram or tree structure to group feature vectors. The proposed super pixel method demonstrates improved classification accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods like quick-shift, turbo pixels, simple linear iterative clustering, and pixel intensity and location similarity. The implementation of the proposed method is efficiently carried out using MATLAB software.

Target Recognition in Single-Channel SAR Images Based on the Complex-Valued Convolutional Neural Network With Data Augmentation

In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning theory, real-valued convolutional neural networks have achieved significant success in the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition. However, different from natural images, the SAR images have complex information due to their special imaging mechanism. Traditional deep learning methods for SAR target recognition only employ the amplitude information and ignore the phase portion, which may sacrifice some useful information in the original complex SAR data. Moreover, the number of samples of SAR images is very limited. This is undoubtedly a huge challenge for the traditional real-valued convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which require numerous labeled data for training. Especially, since the single-channel SAR image contains only one channel, it has less available information than the multiple-channel SAR image. To deal with the above problems, a complex-valued convolutional neural network (CV-Net), for target recognition in single-channel SAR images is proposed in this paper. The amplitude and phase information in the complex SAR data are fully utilized for target recognition. In addition, to alleviate the problem of small samples, this paper also proposed a data augmentation method based on the complex SAR images. The experimental results based on the measured SAR data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has better performance than the traditional real-valued convolutional neural networks.

Spatial Singularity-Exponent-Domain Multiresolution Imaging-Based SAR Ship Target Detection Method

A novel spatial singularity-exponent-domain multiresolution imaging (SSMRI) method is proposed in this article. It is aimed at improving the image processing ability for the single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR), thereby acquiring the robust image feature for SAR target detection at the very low SNR. Combining the 2-D singularity power spectrum (SPS) and the 2-D pseudo-Wigner–Ville distribution (PWVD), the SSMRI method is derived. Consequently, the single-channel SAR images are transformed to obtain spatial multiresolution SAR images with respect to the singularity exponent. Furthermore, the separability of the SAR image target in the space of the singularity exponent is analyzed, and the separability theorem in the sense of SSMRI is proved. In particular, under the background of GWN and fractal noise, the separability of SAR image targets based on SSMRI processing is studied. In addition, the stability and robustness of SSMRI-SAR feature extraction are demonstrated. On this basis, a maritime SAR ship target detection method based on SSMRI is put forward in the extremely low SNR condition. The experiment results on the SAR-Ship-Dataset indicate that the proposed method is superior in performance to the traditional CFAR or 2-D-SPS method. Especially when SNR = −30 dB, the detection performance with more than 99.4% can be achieved.

Polarimetric SAR Despeckling With Convolutional Neural Networks

Coherent imaging systems such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) are subject to speckle, the reduction of which is an active area of study. Methods based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in the removal of additive noise from natural images and speckle from single-channel SAR images. The application of deep learning to multichannel SAR modalities such as polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) is complicated in part by the nature of the data as images of complex-valued covariance matrices. In this article, we propose a CNN-based PolSAR despeckling approach that uses an invertible transformation involving a matrix logarithm to facilitate CNN processing of the PolSAR data. A residual learning strategy is adopted, in which the CNN is trained to identify the speckle component which is then removed from the corrupted image. The experimental results on simulated and measured PolSAR data show the proposed approach to markedly reduce speckle and preserve scene features.

Unsupervised Ship Detection for Single-Channel SAR Images Based on Multiscale Saliency and Complex Signal Kurtosis

Traditional ship detection methods for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mainly utilize the amplitude information to distinguish ship targets from sea clutter, including constant false alarm rate (CFAR), visual attention model, and deep learning methods. The CFAR algorithms adopt the dense sliding window strategy, which is very time-consuming and may generate numerous false alarms. The deep learning methods are supervised and difficult to obtain satisfactory performance when the number of labeled samples is insufficient. The visual attention models can quickly focus on the potential target area, and however, it is still difficult to eliminate the strong clutter, such as radio frequency interference and azimuth ambiguity. In fact, as a coherent imaging system, SAR data itself are complex-valued. Compared with the amplitude information, complex information can essentially reflect the difference between ship target and sea clutter. To improve the accuracy and efficiency of ship detection, in this letter, a novel unsupervised ship detection method based on multiscale saliency and complex signal kurtosis (MSS-CSK) for single-channel SAR images is proposed, which contains the proposal extraction stage and the target discrimination stage. The experimental results based on the Radarsat-2 real SAR data show that the proposed method has high detection accuracy and efficiency.

Internal Calibration for Airborne X-Band DBF-SAR Imaging

Digital beamforming (DBF) synthetic aperture radar (DBSAR) is a promising candidate to overcome the constraint of minimum antenna area in the traditional single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system for achieving high-resolution and wide-swath (HRWS) image. On reception, DBF technology in elevation can significantly improve the system performance such as its sensitivity, ambiguity level, and the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by Scan-On-Receive (SCORE). However, the inevitable channel mismatch will result in a beam-pointing error and further deteriorate the output SNR in the final SAR images. In this letter, the configuration of the 16-channel DBF-SAR system is described. A scheme of semi-physical simulation testbed for 1-D point target imaging is designed. Based on this, a detailed internal calibration technique combined with DBSAR mode is proposed to calibrate the channel mismatch and thus improve the SAR image quality. The real 1-D raw data experiment is performed to validate the proposed scheme. Finally, the imaging results from the practical flight experiment are shown and analyzed.

Target Classification for Single-Channel SAR Images Based on Transfer Learning With Subaperture Decomposition

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images have limited labeled samples, and thus, it is difficult to learn a perfect convolutional neural network (CNN) model for target classification. The commonly used single-channel SAR images have much less information than those of the three-channel natural images. Transfer learning (TL) is an effective way to improve the generalization ability of the CNN model. The existing TL methods for SAR images usually transfer the knowledge from the three-channel natural images to the single-channel SAR images, where the SAR images are simply duplicated from one channel to three channels. This is obviously not reasonable. Indeed, the single-channel SAR image is complex valued, which can be divided into multiple channels (e.g., three channels) via the subaperture decomposition (SD) algorithm. In order to fully utilize the complex-valued data of the single-channel SAR images, in this letter, we propose a novel TL method with SD (TL-SD), where the SD can generate pseudocolor SAR images to realize TL with the large-scale natural image data sets. The experimental results based on the MSTAR real data set show that the proposed TL-SD method achieves an average accuracy of 99.88% on classification of ten-class targets and is superior to the other compared target classification methods, which verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Survey of Research Progress on Target Detection and Discrimination of Single-channel SAR Images for Complex Scenes

As an active microwave imaging sensor, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has become one of the main means of Earth observation owing to its unique technical advantages of all-day, all-weather operation and long working distance. As such, it plays a very important role in military and civilian fields. With the development of SAR remote-sensing technology, high-resolution, high-quality SAR images are produced continuously. However, manual detection and recognition of targets of interest is time-consuming and laborious, so the development of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) technology is a matter of urgency. The typical SAR ATR system primarily comprises three stages: detection, discrimination, and classification/recognition. The detection and discrimination stages are the basis of the SAR ATR system, and research on SAR applications in the radar field has been conducted by researchers around the world. For single-channel SAR images, target detection and discrimination from simple scenes yield good results. However, in complex scenes, the clutter scattering intensity is relatively high, the clutter background is heterogenous, the target scattering intensity is relatively weak, and the target distribution is dense. These factors continue to make accurate SAR target detection and discrimination difficult. In this paper, we summarize the recent research progress on single-channel SAR target detection and discrimination methods for complex scenes, analyze the characteristics and problems associated with various methods, and consider the future development trend of single-channel SAR target detection and discrimination methods for complex scenes.

Integration of Automatic Identification System (AIS) Data and Single-Channel Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Images by SAR-Based Ship Velocity Estimation for Maritime Situational Awareness

The synergic utilization of data from different sources, either ground-based or spaceborne, can lead to effective monitoring of maritime activities. To this end, the integration of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images with data reported by the automatic identification system (AIS) is of high interest. Accurate matching of ships detected in SAR images with AIS data requires compensation of the azimuth offset, which depends on the ship’s velocity. The existing procedures interpolate the route information gathered by AIS to estimate the ship’s velocity at the epoch of the SAR data, to remove the offset. Matching accuracy is limited by interpolation errors and AIS route information unavailability or uncertainties. This paper proposes the use of SAR-based ship velocity estimations to improve the integration of AIS and SAR data. A case study has been analyzed, in which the method has been tested on TerraSAR-X images collected over the Gulf of Naples, Italy. Presented results show that the matching is improved with respect to standard procedures. The proposed method limits the distance between the AIS report and the SAR-based detection to less than 150 m, which is in line with maritime surveillance needs.

Ship Detection in High-Resolution SAR Images by Clustering Spatially Enhanced Pixel Descriptor

This paper proposes a new scheme for detecting ship targets in high-resolution (HR) single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. By using the proposed spatially enhanced pixel descriptor (SEPD) and the modified density-based spatial clustering of application with noise (M-DBSCAN), this scheme can overcome typical challenges of ship detection in HR SAR images. Specifically, the proposed SEPD maps the representation for a given pixel in an SAR image into a high-dimensional feature space by embedding spatial and intensity information of its neighborhood synchronously. It enables the spatial structure information of ship targets and textural information of the sea surface to be preserved by the SEPD feature vector, leading to a significant improvement in the separability between ship targets and sea clutter. A statistical study shows that, in SEPD feature space, a large amount of pixels belonging to sea clutter gather densely in the low-value region and are surrounded by a tiny proportion of ship targets that are distributed sparsely in the high-value region. This distribution characteristic motivates us to apply a density-based clustering approach to distinguish ship targets from the sea clutter. To overcome the weakness of original DBSCAN clustering algorithm and make it suitable for the requirements of ship detection in SAR images, we propose the method of M-DBSCAN, which introduces three critical improvements, including a new dimensionality independent distance metric, a one-class clustering strategy, and an entirely deterministic approach to border points. A novel ship detector is proposed by applying M-DBSCAN to cluster pixels that are represented by SEPD descriptor. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other intensity-based clustering methods ( $k$ -means and fuzzy c-means), and widely used intensity threshold-based method (constant false alarm rate detector) in most circumstances, and can effectively handle various challenging situations appearing in HR images, such as sidelobes, small/weak targets, moving targets, and so on.

Doppler Frequency Estimation of Point Targets in the Single-Channel SAR Image by Linear Least Squares

This paper presents a method and results for the estimation of residual Doppler frequency, and consequently the range velocity component of point targets in single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) focused single-look complex (SLC) data. It is still a challenging task to precisely retrieve the radial velocity of small and slow-moving objects, which requires an approach providing precise estimates from only a limited number of samples within a few range bins. The proposed method utilizes linear least squares, along with the estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) algorithm, to provide optimum estimates from sets of azimuth subsamples that have different azimuth temporal distances. The ratio of estimated Doppler frequency to root-mean square error (RMSE) is suggested for determining a critical threshold, optimally selecting a number of azimuth subsample sets to be involved in the estimation. The proposed method was applied to TerraSAR-X and KOMPSAT-5 X-band SAR SLC data for on-land and coastal sea estimation, with speed-controlled, truck-mounted corner reflectors and ships, respectively. The results demonstrate its performance of the method, with percent errors of less than 5%, in retrieved range velocity for both on-land and in the sea. It is also robust, even for weak targets with low peak-to-sidelobe ratios (PSLRs) and signal-to-clutter ratios (RCSs). Since the characteristics of targets and clutter on land and in the sea are different, it is recommended that the method is applied separately with different thresholds. The limitations of the approach are also discussed.

Nonambiguous SAR Image Formation of Maritime Targets Using Weighted Sparse Approach

For a single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR), finite-pulse repetition frequency and nonideal antenna pattern cause azimuth ambiguities, i.e., ghosts in image domain. In this paper, a novel algorithm of locating processing weighted group lasso SAR image formation for maritime targets is proposed to effectively mitigate the ambiguities, which can work on a single-look complex SAR image. In the scheme, the ambiguous signal model using the conventional SAR focusing processor is first explicitly derived, showing the analytical expression of SAR image formulation. The weighted sparse group lasso algorithm is then employed to group-sparsely reconstruct the subimages of nonambiguous and ambiguous Doppler components. In particular, we introduce adaptively weighted sparsity constraint, obtained from a priori azimuth antenna pattern, and clutter clustering during sparse imaging. It should be emphasized that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the azimuth resolution by coherently integrating the ambiguous signal components, which greatly helps the target detection and recognition in maritime surveillance. Finally, experiments based on simulated and measured data are performed to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Landslide Displacement Monitoring by a Fully Polarimetric SAR Offset Tracking Method

Landslide monitoring is important for geological disaster prevention, where Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images have been widely used. Compared with the Interferometric SAR (InSAR) technique, intensity-based offset tracking methods (e.g., Normalized Cross-Correlation method) can overcome the limitation of InSAR’s maximum detectable displacement. The normalized cross-correlation (NCC) method, based on single-channel SAR images, estimates azimuth and range displacement by using statistical correlation between the matching windows of two SAR images. However, the matching windows—especially for the boundary area of landslide—always contain pixels with different moving characteristics, affecting the precision of displacement estimation. Based on the advantages of polarimetric scattering properties, this paper proposes a fully polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) offset tracking method for improvement of the precision of landslide displacement estimation. The proposed method uses the normalized inner product (NIP) of the two temporal PolSAR Pauli scattering vectors to evaluate their similarity, then retrieve the surface displacement of the Slumgullion landslide located in southwestern Colorado, USA. A pair of L-band fully polarimetric SAR images acquired by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) system are selected for experiment. The results show that the Slumgullion landslide’s moving velocity during the monitoring time ranges between 1.6–10.9 mm/d, with an average velocity of 6.3 mm/d. Compared with the classical NCC method, results of the proposed method present better performance in the sub-pixel estimation. Furthermore, it performs better when estimating displacement in the area around the landslide boundaries.

A new method for speckle reduction in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images using optimal window size

Speckle degrades the radiometric quality of a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image and makes its visual interpretation difficult. The approaches proposed previously for speckle filtering of SAR images exploit a window of fixed size for this purpose. But a fixed size window is not sufficient as the size of objects may vary throughout the image. In this paper, a method is introduced by which each pixel in the image is filtered using a window size which is optimal for that pixel. Real and imaginary parts of a single-channel SAR image are used for the selection of the best window size for each pixel, and then intensity image is filtered by applying that window size. The Average and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) filters are modified using the Adaptive Window Size method. This approach is implemented on the HH-channel of a RADARSAT-2 image acquired over the Avalon Peninsula near St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. This filter can supress speckle effectively while retaining the details reasonably.

Road-Aided Ground Slowly Moving Target 2D Motion Estimation for Single-Channel Synthetic Aperture Radar.

To detect and estimate ground slowly moving targets in airborne single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a road-aided ground moving target indication (GMTI) algorithm is proposed in this paper. First, the road area is extracted from a focused SAR image based on radar vision. Second, after stationary clutter suppression in the range-Doppler domain, a moving target is detected and located in the image domain via the watershed method. The target’s position on the road as well as its radial velocity can be determined according to the target’s offset distance and traffic rules. Furthermore, the target’s azimuth velocity is estimated based on the road slope obtained via polynomial fitting. Compared with the traditional algorithms, the proposed method can effectively cope with slowly moving targets partly submerged in a stationary clutter spectrum. In addition, the proposed method can be easily extended to a multi-channel system to further improve the performance of clutter suppression and motion estimation. Finally, the results of numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Modeling magnitude statistics of multilook SAR interferograms by generalizing G distributions

Statistical analysis of multilook interferograms is a foundational issue in sensor signal processing of multiple-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR), such as slow ground moving target indication (GMTI) in along-track interferometric (ATI) SAR. By an approximate derivation of the product of two modified Bessel functions, we propose in this paper a distribution (denoted simply as ΓIn) to model the interferometric magnitude of homogeneous clutter and analyze the capability of approximation using ΓIn according to numerical calculations. Following this, under the frame of the product model and by utilizing ΓIn, we analytically provide two distributions, KIn and GIn0, corresponding to heterogeneous and extremely heterogeneous terrain clutter, respectively. We show that the proposed ΓIn,KIn and GIn0 are the multi-channel generalizations of the well-known Γ,K and G0, respectively, which belong to the special cases of G distribution for single-channel SAR images. Finally, the estimators of the proposed models are obtained by applying the Method of Log Cumulants (MoLC), which can accurately calculate the contained parameters. Experiments performed on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (NASA/JPL) AirSAR images that used the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence as a similarity measurement verified the performance of the proposed models and estimators.

Multilook polarimetric SAR data probability density function estimation using a generalized form of multivariate K-distribution

In our previous work, the probability density function (pdf) of single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data was modelled as a generalized form of the univariate K-distribution in order to incorporate higher order moments in the pdf estimation. In this paper, we extend this univariate model to the multivariate case, the objective being the sample covariance matrix pdf estimation of multilook polarimetric SAR data. Applying the product model, and assuming the texture distribution as the Laguerre expansion of the gamma distribution, we derive this pdf, which is a generalized form of the well-known multivariate K-distribution. The resulting distributions are assessed quantitatively with respect to multilook fully polarimetric L-band SAR image data from which we conclude that the proposed pdf demonstrates an improved goodness of fit.

Moving-Target Tracking in Single-Channel Wide-Beam SAR

A novel method for moving-target tracking using single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with a large antenna beamwidth is introduced and evaluated using a field experiment and real SAR data. The presented approach is based on subaperture SAR processing, image statistics, and multitarget unscented Kalman filtering. The method is capable of robustly detecting and tracking moving objects over time, providing information not only about the existence of moving targets but also about their trajectories in the image space while illuminated by the radar beam. We have successfully applied the method on an experimental data set using miniature SAR to accurately characterize the movement of vehicles on a highway section in the radar image space.