Noncircularity parameters and their potential in ship detection from high resolution SAR imagery

Traditionally, phase content and information contained in the complex data in single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is often discarded based on the conventional resolution theory. With the rapid development of SAR technology, however, ship target is no longer a point target but an extended target in high resolution SAR imagery. Thus, the conventional resolution theory is not strictly applicable to high resolution SAR imagery. Noncircularity can describe the distribution consistency between the real and imaginary parts. In this paper, we proposed a method using noncircularity parameters for ship detection in high resolution SAR imagery. The potential by using noncircularity parameters for ship detection is studied in detail. Experimental results based on TerraSAR-X data show that noncircularity parameters can identify ship targets well and can discriminate azimuth ambiguities. We believe that noncircularity parameters can benefit ship detection in various research aspects.