PolSAR Ship Detection via a Refined Polarimetric Notch Filter

Detection of ships using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data has become a promising research area. The polarimetric notch filter (PNF) detector has demonstrated superior performance in PolSAR ship detection. In this work, a refined PNF based on patch variation indicator is proposed for ship target detection. Meanwhile, a standard polarimetric whitening filter (PWF) is applied to reduce the variation of sea clutter. The experimental results on simulated data and measured data demonstrate that the refined PNF detector exhibits a better performance than the original PNF.