On the Iterative Censoring for Target Detection in SAR Images

In this letter, a censoring scheme that iteratively updates the outlier/target maps for target detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed. For each iteration, any pixels that are indicated by the outlier map as outliers are rejected (censored out) from the clutter estimation. The resulting detected target map is then used as the new outlier map for the next iteration. This procedure is continued until there is no change to the target map, which is then output as the final detection result. The proposed scheme is generically applicable for target detection in both single-channel and multichannel SAR images. In our experiment, in particular, we tested the proposed method on both single-channel and polarimetric SAR data, and its effectiveness was successfully demonstrated.