Ship Detection after Removal of Ambiguities by Using PolSAR Images

Ambiguities in SAR image are very common phenomena. For maritime applications, as the high intensities of the ambiguities in low radar backscatter background of sea environments, they can be mistaken as targets and cause false alarms in ship detection. Thus, through the analysis of polarimetric characteristics of ships and ambiguities, we propose a ship detection method which applies the eigenvalue to differentiating the ship target and azimuth ambiguities. One set of Cband JPL AIRSAR polarimetric data covered Kojimawan Bay, Japan has been chosen to evaluate the method that can effectively remove false alarms caused by the azimuth ambiguities.