Interactive ship segmentation in SAR images

Ship detection from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is important for various automatic target recognition (ATR) tasks. Although the ships in offshore areas can be easily detected, the ones near the shores or close to each other are difficult to detect. Furthermore, segmentation and classification of such ships is extremely difficult. In this study, a novel approach is presented for the fast and accurate segmentation of ship boundaries with minimal user interaction. In this approach, the rough location and orientation of a ship is determined by the user. Then, a ship model, which is constructed from synthetic ship images, is fitted on to the ship selected by the user and accurate ship boundaries are extracted. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by experimental results.