Comparison of ship detectors using polarimetric alos data: Tokyo Bay

Ship detection with Synthetic Aperture Radar is a largely investigated topic and a series of operational algorithms are currently exploited by the users community. Polarimetry may play an important rule in this context, since the next generation of SAR satellites will be able to perform large swath polarimetric (either dual or compact) acquisitions. In this work, a comparison of promising ship detectors employing polarimetric information is performed over an ALOS-PALSAR quad-polarimetric dataset acquired over Tokyo Bay (October 2008). Interestingly, a survey of the area is available allowing to provide some quantitative comparison of the different detectors. The results show that the quad polarimetric detectors return better detection performance than the dualor single-polarimetric ones.