Detection of ships using sub-aperture airborne PolSAR data

The objective of this paper is to assess the sub-aperture analysis for ship detection using airborne polarimetric SAR data. Three optimal non-normalized coherences can be obtained by tuning the polarization status using the full polarimetric SAR data. These parameters are used to greatly improve the contrast between ships and ocean clutter, since it preserves the intensity and phase information of the coherent target. The airborne polarimetric SAR data is applied to evaluate the results of polarimetric sub-aperture detection for the ships over the ocean. In this way, the improvement in ship detection performance that is realized by using polarimetric information and coherence product is demonstrated in this paper.