Dual Polarization Detection of Ships and Icebergs - Recent Results with ENVISAT ASAR and Data Simulations of RADARSAT-2

摘要

The RADARSAT-2 satellite is an advanced C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with a variety of new modes including options for polarization combinations, resolution, and swath width. This paper examines the potential of multi polarization data for detecting and discriminating ship and iceberg targets Data used in this study consist of well validated airborne Convair-580 SAR and spaceborne ASAR HH/HV and HH/VV. In total, the data set used for evaluating detection and discrimination consists of 901 validated iceberg and ship targets. Optimizing target detection is accomplished using receiver operator curves (ROC) as proposed by [6] and discrimination is conducted using a quadratic discriminant (QD) with feature selection based on sequential forward selection (SFS). In general it was found that detection and discrimination improve with more polarimetric information; however, HH/HV and VV/VH only had nominally less discrimination performance than the quad polarization modes evaluated.