A novel ship-detection technique for Sentinel-1 SAR data

The paper shows a novel algorithm for ship-detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. The algorithm is divided in three main steps: land mask rejection, detection and discrimination. In the first step land pixels are rejected by using Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data; in the second stage the potential ships are detected on a method based on the Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) and, finally, some targets are rejected by removing the azimuth ambiguities and by gathering the target pixels in clusters. The algorithm is tested on a Sentinel-1 image acquired over the Portsmouth harbour and compared with the outcomes coming from a Constant False Alarm Algorithm (CFAR).