A CA-CFAR and localized wavelet ship detector for Sentinel-1 imagery

The Maritime Domain Awareness initiative seeks to constantly improve the ways in which maritime information is collected. With the recent release of free Sentinel-1 imagery to the public, monitoring the maritime environment has become a more affordable. Using the basis of a cell-averaging constant false alarm rate prescreening method as input, this paper presents a novel method for detecting ships within Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery using a Gabor wavelet correlator. The method proposed allows for any configuration of the filter bank and prevents false detections by processing possible targets at a local scale. The method was tested against two Sentinel-1 images in both HH and HV polarization with a total of 82 ships. The method provided significantly improved FAR over the conventional CA-CFAR method at the cost of slightly worse detection accuracies in some cases.