Adaptive Superpixel-Level CFAR Detector for SAR Inshore Dense Ship Detection

Ship monitoring is an important application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The constant false alarm rate (CFAR) methods are commonly used for ship detection. However, CFAR detectors usually face challenges for inshore dense ship detection. Due to the significant mixture of ship candidates and se...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters 2022, Vol.19, p.1-5
Main Authors: Li, Ming-Dian, Cui, Xing-Chao, Chen, Si-Wei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Clustering
Clutter
Constant false alarm rate
Constant false alarm rate (CFAR)
Detection
Detectors
Estimation
Marine vehicles
Methods
Radarsat
SAR (radar)
Sensors
ship detection
Ships
superpixel
Synthetic aperture radar
synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
Topology
Veins
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Ship monitoring is an important application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The constant false alarm rate (CFAR) methods are commonly used for ship detection. However, CFAR detectors usually face challenges for inshore dense ship detection. Due to the significant mixture of ship candidates and sea clutters within the clutter window, the detection threshold may be overestimated leading to many missed detections. To mitigate this issue, a superpixel-level CFAR detector is proposed. The main contribution contains two aspects. First, a labeling procedure is established for pure clutter superpixels and mixture superpixels discrimination in terms of unsupervised clustering. Second, a nonlocal topology strategy is proposed to adaptively determine a sufficient number of pure clutter superpixels for detection threshold estimation. In this vein, an adaptive superpixel-level CFAR approach is constructed and validated with Radarsat-2, Sentinel-1, and AIRSARShip-1 data sets. Comparison studies demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. Compared with a traditional CFAR detector and two recent superpixel methods, the proposed method achieves clearly better performance for inshore dense ship regions.
ISSN:1545-598X
1558-0571
DOI:10.1109/LGRS.2021.3059253