Multi-feature extraction of ships from SAR images

Pose and structural features are widely used in automatic target recognition (ATR) systems. A procedure is proposed to extract such features of ships from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The ship closed-contour image is first produced using a standard algorithm. A new two-step process is then presented for exact azimuth angle estimation. Modified criteria of centerline and minimum enclosing rectangle (MER) extraction are developed, and applied to calculate the ship dimension. Experimental results for numerically simulated SAR images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.