A Novel Ship Detection Approach for Polarimetric SAR Images Based on a Foreground/Background Separation Framework

In this paper, we present a novel ship detection approach for Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images based on a Foreground/background separation (FBS) framework, which exploits the statistical dissimilarity of PolSAR data to separate desired targets from the background clutter. Since the FBS framework takes the spatial relations between pixels into consideration and the separation process exploits the inherent characteristics of PolSAR data, the proposed detector is stable to speckle. And the detection process is filter-free, thus it can preserve the edge and shape information of the extracted targets. Experimental results and comparisons with the standard polarimetric detector show that the proposed method is promising. Factors that affect the performance of the proposed detector are also analyzed and discussed in this paper.