Compact-Pol SAR Ship Detection Combining Sublook Analysis and Tucker Decomposition

Compact polarimetry synthetic aperture radar (compact-pol SAR) provides relatively rich polarimetric information while maintaining a wide swath, which is quite suitable for ship detection on the broad sea. Sublook analysis (SLA) on single-look complex (SLC) image provides additional information in a frequency perspective. A ship detection method combining SLA and tucker decomposition is proposed to fully combine and utilize polarization and frequency information at the same time in compact-pol SAR data. The proposed ship detection method mainly contains four steps: SLA, conventional compact-pol feature extraction, tensor construction and decomposition, and support vector machine (SVM) and morphological filtering. Experimental studies are carried out with Radarsat-2 and GaoFen-3 datasets. Compared with using only SLC data, SLC and SLA data, the proposed method achieves superior performances.