PolSAR ship detection based on the contrast enhancement of polarimetric scattering differences. Issue 18 (17th September 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Pan, Xueli; Liao, Guisheng; Yang, Zhiwei
• Is Part Of: International journal of remote sensing. Volume 40:Issue 18(2019)
• Page Start: 7071
• Page End: 7083
• Publication Date: 2019-09-17
• Subjects: Remote sensing -- Periodicals; Télédétection -- Périodiques; 621.3678
• DOI: 10.1080/01431161.2019.1601278
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0143-1161

Abstract

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.