An Intensity-Space Domain CFAR Method for Ship Detection in HR SAR Images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an indispensable and extensively used sensor in ship detection. As high-resolution SAR introduces more spatial details into images, this letter proposes an intensity-space (IS) domain constant false alarm rate (CFAR) ship detector to make good use of this informatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters 2017-04, Vol.14 (4), p.529-533
Main Authors: Wang, Chonglei, Bi, Fukun, Zhang, Weiping, Chen, Liang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Clutter
Constant false alarm rate
Constant false alarm rate (CFAR)
Correlation
Detection
Detectors
high-resolution (HR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
Image resolution
Indexes
intensity-space (IS) domain
Marine vehicles
Radar imaging
Remote sensing
Resolution
SAR (radar)
ship detection
Shipboard equipment
Ships
Synthetic aperture radar
target enhancement
Transforms
Wakes
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Summary:Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an indispensable and extensively used sensor in ship detection. As high-resolution SAR introduces more spatial details into images, this letter proposes an intensity-space (IS) domain constant false alarm rate (CFAR) ship detector to make good use of this information. The method fuses intensity of each pixel and correlations between pixels into one characteristic, i.e., IS index. All the detection procedures center on the calculation and analysis of IS index. First, a new transform maps an image into a new IS domain. Structures like ships and wakes are enhanced in IS domain. Second, a CFAR detector picks up high IS index pixels. Third, a chain of target features is checked to screen out false candidate target pixels. Also, enhanced wakes are taken to improve detection results. Experiments on real SAR images validate that the proposed transform does enhance these structures and the whole algorithm is of good performance, especially in the case of low-contrast targets.
ISSN:1545-598X
1558-0571
DOI:10.1109/LGRS.2017.2654450