Using SAR Images to Detect Ships From Sea Clutter

Author

Liao, Mingsheng ; Wang, Changcheng ; Wang, Yong ; Jiang, Liming

Author_Institution

State Key Lab. for Inf. Eng. in Surveying, Wuhan Univ., Wuhan

Volume

5

Issue

2

fYear

2008

fDate

4/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

194

Lastpage

198

Abstract

An innovative constant false alarm rate (CFAR) algorithm was studied for ship detection using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of the sea. Two advances were achieved. An alpha-stable distribution rather than a traditional Weibull or -distribution was used to model the distribution of sea clutter. The distribution of sea clutter in a SAR image was typically heterogeneous, caused mainly by variable wind and current conditions. Image segmentation was carried out to improve the homogeneity of the distribution in each subimage or region. In comparison with ship detection using the CFAR algorithms based on the Weibull or K -distribution, our algorithm detected the most number of ships with the smallest number of false alarms.

Keywords

Weibull distribution; image segmentation; radar clutter; radar detection; radar imaging; ships; synthetic aperture radar; K distribution; SAR images; Weibull distribution; constant false alarm rate algorithm; image segmentation; sea clutter; ship detection; synthetic aperture radar; Alpha-stable distribution; constant false alarm rate (CFAR); ship detection; synthetic aperture radar (SAR);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1545-598X

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LGRS.2008.915593

Filename

4456345