Ship detection over single-look complex SAR images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection is an important application in the context of environment and security monitoring. Ship detection techniques are generally based on statistically significant contrast between the ship and the local ocean background. Typically, high resolution (few tenths of meters) SAR images need to be considered. Such images are heavily affected by the presence of the speckle, and, for this reason, many ship detection algorithms employ constant false alarm rate (CFAR) algorithms. In this study, a different approach is proposed. The speckle is not mitigated but considered as a source of information. The ship is considered as a dominant scatterer responsible for a strong and coherent backscatter signal. Hence, the different behavior of the speckle statistics in presence of a dominant scatterer exploited. A new simple and very effective filtering technique, which is able to process high resolution SAR images, has been conceived an implemented. Experiments, accomplished over C-band Single Look Complex ERS 1/2 SAR images, show the effectiveness of this new approach for ship detection.