Ship Detection for High-Resolution SAR Images Based on Feature Analysis

High-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data have been widely used in marine environmental protection, marine environmental monitoring, and marine traffic management. Ship detection is one of the important parts of SAR data for marine applications. This letter focuses on the feature analysis of ships in high-resolution SAR images and proposes an improved optimizing algorithm for ship detection. A fast block detector is designed to extract sea clutter in a uniform local area, and then a constant false alarm rate detector is employed. Based on the kernel density estimation of ships, aspect ratio, and pixel points, ships are identified. TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMed images are used to test our algorithm. The experimental results show that this algorithm can be implemented with time-saving, high-precision ship extraction, feature analysis, and detection.