PolSAR Ship Detection Using the Joint Polarimetric Information

In this article, we investigate the scattering components of ships and find that the surface scattering may be the primary scattering for some ships, especially small ships. Meanwhile, the drawbacks of the complete polarimetric covariance difference matrix [CP] are also pointed out in theory. Based on these analyses, two new methods are then constructed to detect the ships. More specifically, the first one RsP is constructed by directly combining the similarity parameter of surface scattering Rs and the power-maximization synthesis (PMS) detector. The second one RsDVH is designed by taking advantage of four different features (i.e., Rs, double-bounce scattering, volume scattering, and helix scattering), which are all derived from the joint polarimetric information that is developed by combing the information of the polarimetric covariance matrix [
$C$
] and [CP]. Subsequently, the generalized
Gamma
distribution (
$\text{G}\Gamma \text{D}$
) is found suitable for characterizing the RsDVH values of the sea clutter. At last, an adaptive constant false-alarm-rate (CFAR) detector developed from RsDVH is proposed for ship detection. To verify the effectiveness of RsP and RsDVH, four polarization synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imageries are tested, including one L-band UAVSAR imagery with 19 ships, two L-band AIRSAR imageries with 22 and 53 ships, respectively, and one C-band GF-3 imagery with ten ships. The experimental results show that: 1) the surface scattering is beneficial to detecting ships, especially the ships with prominent surface scatterings; 2) compared with other state-of-the-art methods, RsDVH can more effectively enhance the target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) values of small ships in the case of rough sea surface; and 3) the joint polarimetric information that is put forward and exploited for the first time in this article has a greater potential to help ship detectors improve their detection performances than the traditional polarimetric information included in [
$C$
].