Small target detection using enhanced SAR images

This paper investigates the impact of SAR image enhancement on the performance of small target detection in SAR images. Three SAR image enhancement algorithms are evaluated on large SAR image data-sets. The evaluation results show that image enhancement can greatly improve the performance of false alarm mitigation, and that the level of performance improvement is correlated with the resolution and background suppression of the enhanced images. The higher the resolution and the level of background suppression, the higher the level of performance improvement.