PolSAR Ship Detection with Polarimetric Correlation Pattern

Polarimetric correlation pattern has been proposed and utilized for polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) ship detection in this paper. The core idea of polarimetric correlation pattern is to extend the polarimetric correlation of two arbitrary polarization channels at a fixed rotation angle to the rotation domain. Based on the target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) analysis, four features derived from the polarimetric correlation pattern with high TCR are selected. PolSAR ship detection schemes are proposed thereafter, which mainly contain three steps: features selection with high TCR, thresholding procedure, and morphological filtering. Experimental studies with Radarsat-2 data validate the advantages of the proposed detection schemes.