Exploiting the polarimetric information for the detection of ship targets in non-homogeneous SAR images

Ship detection in polarimetric SAR images of non-homogeneous sea areas is considered. We demonstrate the impact of non-homogeneous sea features on the false alarm rate and the need of extracting the image structure. We thus introduce polarimetric segmentation procedures that cooperate with high-resolution polarimetric detection features for the control of the false alarms. Different polarimetric segmentation-plus-detection procedures are tested over real data to devise the appropriate method to exploit the polarimetric information.