Ship surveillance with Radarsat-2 ScanSAR

Ship detection is a significant application of maritime monitoring and security. To fully explore the potential of wide coverage of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image, the ScanSAR Wide image for ship detection is investigated in this paper. The Radarsat-2 ScanSAR Wide mode image is used as the image source due to its huge coverage and constant false alarm rate (CFAR) with Gamma distribution is selected as the core detector. Two problems of ScanSAR ship detection, the unbalanced phenomenon and false alarms of islands, are investigated and solved by a compensation step and Hessian matrix respectively. For more aspects, the detector also concerns the polarization channel selection and distribution fitting. Finally, a whole flow chart of ScanSAR ship detection is presented. As test cases, the experimental image is used to show the efficiency of our method.

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