A novel polarimetric SAR ship detection filter

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection is an important application in the context of environment and security monitoring. Many ship detection algorithms have been developed by image-based techniques. However, speckle and natural physical phenomenon, e.g., fronts, internal waves, etc., can cause false alarms and reduce their detection performances. In this paper, a new physical approach which considers ship having dominant double-bounced scattering contribution and therefore, predicting a completely different scattering mechanism for ship targets and sea surface, is here proposed. Based on this rationale, a new simple and very effective filtering technique has been conceived and implemented. Experiments, accomplished over fully polarimetric L-band Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle (UAV) SAR data, show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.