Ship classification in TerraSAR-X SAR images based on classifier combination

Ship classification is an important step in maritime surveillance utilizing synthetic aperture radar images. In this paper, we focus on the classifier architecture. The paper investigates three individual classifiers, i.e., the K nearest neighbor classifier, the Bayes classifier, and the back-propagation neural network classifier from the viewpoint of discrimination measurements firstly. Then, we propose a SVM combination strategy to fuse the results of individual classifiers. Extensive experiments conducted on the TerraSAR-X SAR images validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.