The Maritime Domain Awareness initiative seeks to constantly improve the ways in which maritime information is collected. With the recent release of free Sentinel-1 imagery to the public, monitoring the maritime environment has become a more affordable. Using the basis of a cell-averaging constant false alarm rate prescreening method as input, this paper presents a novel method for detecting ships within Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery using a Gabor wavelet correlator. The method proposed allows for any configuration of the filter bank and prevents false detections by processing possible targets at a local scale. The method was tested against two Sentinel-1 images in both HH and HV polarization with a total of 82 ships. The method provided significantly improved FAR over the conventional CA-CFAR method at the cost of slightly worse detection accuracies in some cases.
Reference:
Schwegmann, CP, Kleynhans, W, Salmon, BP and Mdakane, L. 2015. A CA-CFAR and localized wavelet ship detector for sentinel-1 imagery. In: IGARSS 2015, Milan, Italy, 26-31 July 2015
Schwegmann, C., Kleynhans, W., Salmon, B., & Mdakane, L. (2015). A CA-CFAR and localized wavelet ship detector for sentinel-1 imagery. IEEE. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/8490
Schwegmann, CP, W Kleynhans, BP Salmon, and L Mdakane. "A CA-CFAR and localized wavelet ship detector for sentinel-1 imagery." (2015): http://hdl.handle.net/10204/8490
Schwegmann C, Kleynhans W, Salmon B, Mdakane L, A CA-CFAR and localized wavelet ship detector for sentinel-1 imagery; IEEE; 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/8490 .
