Distributed target detection in SAR images using improved chaos-based method

Detection of distributed targets such as internal wave or ship wake on sea surface in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is an important application of ocean microwave remote sensing. The chaotic characteristic of sea clutter gives some clues to targets detection on sea surface. Speckle, the inherent noise of SAR image, will affect the predictive accuracy of sea clutter adversely and reduce the detection performance of radar. In order to apply the chaotic characteristic of sea clutter to targets detection in SAR images more effectively, an improved chaos-based detection method is proposed in this paper. First, speckle noise is suppressed by undecimated wavelet transform (UWT), and then targets are detected on the basis of the chaotic characteristic of sea clutter from the denoised SAR images. Experimental results prove that the method proposed in this paper is effective for the distributed targets detection in SAR ocean images.