Ship Detection From PolSAR Imagery Using the Complete Polarimetric Covariance Difference Matrix

In this paper, we proposed a complete polarimetric covariance difference matrix [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$CP$ </tex-math></inline-formula>]-based algorithm for ship detection in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imagery. To calculate [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$CP$ </tex-math></inline-formula>], we first developed a scheme to reflect the polarimetric scattering differences between ship pixel (SP) and its neighboring pixels (ISPs) and, then, dividedly accumulated the amplitude and phase differences between SP and ISPs. Compared to the polarimetric covariance difference matrix [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula>] developed in our earlier work, [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$CP$ </tex-math></inline-formula>] effectively overcomes the drawback of the lack of the phase information in [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula>]. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we applied the [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$CP$ </tex-math></inline-formula>]-based ship detection algorithm to four PolSAR data sets, including one UAVSAR L-band data set with 21 ships, two AIRSAR L-band data sets with 11 and 22 ships, respectively, and one Radarsat-2 C-band data set with 8 ships. Experimental results show that: 1) the proposed algorithm can effectively detect ships with high target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) values and 2) [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$CP$ </tex-math></inline-formula>] has a better performance than the traditional polarimetric covariance matrix [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C$ </tex-math></inline-formula>] and [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula>] on ship detection. To be more specific, the average TCR value of the proposed algorithm (23.86 dB) is 6.07 and 7.47 dB higher than PNF<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{C}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> (i.e., the geometrical perturbation-polarimetric notch filter) and RS<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{C}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> (i.e., the reflection symmetry method), respectively.

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