Azimuth ambiguities removal for ship detection using full polarimetric X-band SAR data

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an active sensor that provides high-resolution images of the Earth surface day and night with almost no interferences of the weather conditions. Thanks to these characteristics, during the past decade, its use in the field of maritime security and safety has increased. Nowadays one of the SAR-based applications to increase the maritime security is ship detection. Automatic SAR ship detection is not a trivial task due to the speckle and processes that may cause false alarms. Azimuth ambiguities caused by the aliasing of the Doppler phase history are often visible in low radar backscatter background causing false positive. In this work we propose a method to resolve azimuth ambiguities for ship detection purposes that takes the complete benefit of full Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data combined with the high resolution capability of X-band sensors.