A new scattering similarity based metric for ship detection in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar image

摘要

A new paradigm for ship detection in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar(Pol-SAR)image is presented.We firstly utilize the scattering similarity parameters to investigate the differences of scattering mechanism between ships and sea clutter.Based on these differences,we propose a novel ship detection metric,denoted as the scattering similarity based metric(SSM),to conduct ship detection task.The distribution model of SSM metric is investigated and modeled by kernel density estimation(KDE).Based on the statistical distribution,an adaptive constant false alarm rate(CFAR)detection scheme is implemented.We compare the proposed SSM with two classic polarimetric metrics,i.e.,the polarimetric cross-entropy(PCE)and the reflection symmetry metric(RSM).The experimental results conducted on C-band RADARSAT-2 Pol-SAR data demonstrate the feasibility and advantage of the proposed SSM metric both in sea clutter modeling and in ship detection.