Ship detection in Sentinel-1 imagery using the H-dome transformation

The ability to reliably detect ships within the ocean is one of the core capabilities of Maritime Domain Awareness. Constant improvements are pursued in both computational speed and reliable responses to events by exploring new ship detection methods. One such improvement is the availability of Sentinel-1 imagery. Owing to the fact that ships are considered locally bright objects, we propose using the H-dome transform to process the SAR image and improve ship detectability. The method was tested against two Sentinel-1 images in both HH and HV polarizations containing 82 ships. The method improved the false alarm rates when compared to the conventional cell-averaging Constant False Alarm Rate method at a minor reduction in detection accuracy.