Automatic Ship Detection Using PolSAR Imagery and the Double Scatterer Model

Abstract

In ship detection by means of Polarimetric SAR imagery, a very promising feature is the characterization of the pixels of the ship based on the elementary scattering mechanisms that can be extracted using different decomposition algorithms. Elementary scattering mechanisms provide information regarding the physical, electrical and geometrical properties of the scatterers in each Polarimetric SAR pixel. In this work, the newly established algorithm of the Double Scatterer Model is applied to interpret each pixel of the Polarimetric SAR image with the contributions of two elementary scattering mechanisms, namely, primary and secondary. The main idea is to construct a binary image while preserving the rich information content in order to proceed in simple and fast image processing for target detection. The present algorithm is applied to datasets with different inherent characteristics acquired by Radarsat-2 and ALOS-PALSAR. The results presented by this new perspective on ship monitoring are remarkable.

Keywords

• ship detection
• PolSAR
• target decomposition
• double scatterer model
• image processing
• decision tree