Maritime ship detection with concise polarimetric characterization pattern

Abstract

Influenced by the diversified target structures and complex electromagnetic environments, accurate maritime ship detection using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) remains an intractable and open-ended problem. In this paper, a discriminative polarimetric ship detector is proposed, in which the physical scattering characterization is emphasized throughout. Specifically, based on the adequate perception of relationship between target scattering and geometric structure, a set of scattering structure angles is firstly designed, which can be used to directly extract the scattering type information. Subsequently, by modulating the total scattering power with the scattering structure angles, a concise polarimetric decomposition scheme is proposed, which can reasonably describe the global and local ship structure scattering. At last, through integrating the output scattering contributions into information entropy theory, a ship detector called cross contribution entropy is constructed, which can effectively highlight the interested ships and remarkably suppress the background interferences. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed methodologies are subjectively and objectively validated with real PolSAR data with different marine backgrounds compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method can achieve the highest figure-of-merit (FoM) and significantly enhance the target-to-clutter ratio.

Keywords

• Maritime ship detection
• Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar
• Scattering structure angle
• Concise polarimetric decomposition
• Cross contribution entropy