Ship detection based on improved S-NMF method for fully polarimetric Radarsat-2 data

It´s worth to investigate that the false alarm is reduced with polarimetic information while keeping the detection ratio when the fully polarimetic SAR images used for ship detection. An improved S-NMF (Sparseness-Nonnegative Matrix Factorization) for ship detection according to the nonnegative and sparseness characteristics of eigenvalues is proposed in this paper. The first two eigenvalues are used for NMF decomposition since they take most of the energy of the targets, and then we combine the advantage of the third eigenvalue which could get rid of the false alarms for ship detection with the OS-CFAR method. The proposed method is validated using Radarsat-2 fully polarimetric images with the corresponding AIS data. Results show that it cannot only detect most of the ships, but also reduce the false alarms effectively, and has good ability when the detection conditions change.