A ship detector using invariant scattering feature for polarimetric SAR images

Ship detection and monitoring techniques are important applications in protection of marine resources. In this paper, a ship detection method is proposed based on the Freeman three component decomposition and OS-CFAR detector. The detector has been applied on RADARSAT-2 QUAD Mode image to demonstrate the efficiency of the method. Compared with polarimetric white filter, SPAN image, HH-CFAR and HV-CFAR methods, the proposed method can detect ships in ocean clutter correctly and control false alarms well. Moreover, this method does not depend on the size of targets and therefore offers more adaptability for ship detection.