Ship Detection Algorithm Based on Spatially Variant Apodization Sidelobe Suppression and Order Statistic-Constant False Alarm Rate

Abstract

The special imaging mechanism of the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) causes the sidelobe effect on SAR images. In target detection, the sidelobe effect changes the shapes of strong reflective targets, which results in the problems of localization difficulty and localization error. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a ship detection algorithm based on Spatially Variant Apodization (SVA) and Order Statistic-Constant False Alarm Rate (OS-CFAR). First, the global-CFAR algorithm is used to prescreen the potential target points, which reduces the computational burden of the following steps. Second, the SVA algorithm is modified to improve the speed of sidelobe suppression and applied to the raw complex image data. Then, the nonlinear method OS-CFAR is used to detect the targets on the processed image, and the morphological dilation processing is used to make up for the wrong suppressed points caused by the SVA algorithm. Finally, the GF-3 SAR images are used to test the algorithm and the comparison of the image contrast and detected numbers in the results with SVA and without SVA verifies the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords

• target detection
• sidelobe effect
• spatially variant apodization (sva)
• order statistic-constant false alarm rate (os-cfar)
• gf-3 sar images