Ship Detection Using the Surface Scattering Similarity and Scattering Power

Abstract

Sea surface and ship have different backscattering mechanisms, in which surface scattering is predominant for sea surface in the low sea state case. Based on this fact, many ship detectors have been developed by suppressing the surface scattering resulted from sea surface. Actually, small ship may also have strong surface scattering sometimes. In such a case, the methods of avoiding using surface scattering features may easily miss the detection of small ships. To verify this point, in this paper, we first analyze the shortcomings of An’s method which is based on surface scattering similarity and the power maximization synthesis detector (PMS), and then improve it for detecting small ships more effectively. In order to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, AIRSAR L-Band Polarimetric SAR dataset is exploited. Comparing to other methods, the new method shows a better ship detection performance.