CFAR Detection of ships based on Median Absolute Deviation for SAR imagery in a Heterogeneous Weibull Sea Clutter

Ship detection in SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) imagery plays a crucial role in maritime surveillance, enabling the monitoring of vessel activity, ensuring maritime safety, and supporting security operations. In this work, we propose a new CFAR (Constant False Alarm Rate) ship detector for a heterogeneous Weibull sea clutter, specifically designed for SAR imagery. This detector is an extension of the MAD (Median Absolute Deviation) detector to ship targets, a robust measure of the variability to achieve a high DR (Detection Rate). Extensive evaluations using real SAR images show that the proposed MAD-CFAR ship detector exhibits excellent detection performances in terms of DR and CPU (Central Processing Unit) time. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed CFAR ship detector, highlighting its potential for real-time of large-scale maritime surveillance applications. This research work contributes to advancing ship detection capabilities in SAR imagery and holds great promise for enhancing maritime security and situational awareness.