Adaptive threshold and sub-look processing in ship detection by SAR

The paper focuses on similarities and difference between adaptive threshold and sub-look processing in ship detection by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). The main goal is to formalize the cascade application of both methods to achieve an overall reduction of the false alarm rate. The methods are tested on TerraSAR-X stripmap SAR data collected over the Gulf of Naples, Italy. Input parameters are set considering vessel traffic statistics in the area. Preliminary results confirm the capability of both the methods to attain very high detection rate (with zero missed detections in the considered case), and show that the synergic use of the methods reduces the number of false alarms, with respect to application of a single method.