Phase spectrum based automatic ship detection in synthetic aperture radar images

Abstract

This paper proposes an automatic ship detection approach in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Images using phase spectrum. The proposed method mainly contains two stages: Firstly, sea-land segmentation of SAR Images is one of the key stages for SAR image application such as sea-targets detection and recognition, which are easily detected only in sea regions. In order to eliminate the influence of land regions in SAR images, a novel land removing method is explored. The removing method employs a Harris corner detector to obtain some image patches belonging to land, and the probability density function (PDF) of land area can be estimated by these patches. Thus, an appropriate land segmentation threshold is accordingly obtained. Secondly, an automatic ship detector based on phase spectrum is proposed. The proposed detector is free from various idealized assumptions and can accurately detect ships in SAR images. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed ship detection algorithm in diversified SAR images.

Keywords

• Ship detection
• saliency detection
• phase spectrum
• sea-land segmentation