Vessel detection method for high resolution Cosmo-Skymed SAR imagery

Vessel detection becomes more and more important applications of remote sensing. In this paper, a vessel detection method based on gravity enhancement and multi-scale processing was applied to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. With the method, targets´ pixels were enhanced by the interactions between themselves and their neighbors, while the speckle and background clutter were suppressed after enhancement as well as the contrasts between targets and clutter had been greatly increased. In high resolution SAR image, vessel includes more pixels and can show its structure in the image. Traditional Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) detector which is proper for low resolution SAR image may lead to more false alarms if it is applied to high resolution image. So before segmentation, multi-scale processing was applied to avoid this problem. Cosmo-Skymed image with 3 meter pixel spacing was adopted to test the algorithm. Results show good ability for vessel detection with the high resolution SAR image.