Ship detectors exploiting spectral analysis of SAR images

Ship detection is an important topic for security and surveillance of maritime and costal areas. A solution exploiting satellite-borne SAR sensors is particularly interesting, because it offers wide scale surveillance capabilities, which are not reliant on solar illumination and are rather independent of weather conditions ([1], [2], [3]). In SAR images, the main feature of a ship is a relatively large backscattering signal, which is usually brighter in comparison with the sea background. This led to the idea of using the intensity contrast as a feature to discriminate between targets and sea clutter. Several methodologies were proposed ([1], [3]). Most of these techniques set a statistical test between target and clutter background. Recently, the several ship detectors were proposed that exploits the property of SAR images to perform detection. In this work, two methodologies used for coherent scatterer detection are tested for the first time for ship detection and a comparison of ship detectors based on spectral analysis is performed over L-band ALOS date accompanied by a ground survey.