An Efficient Scheme For Ship Detection In High-Resolution Terrasar-X Images

An efficient method for ship detection is proposed, aiming at high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) is low due to interferers, including SAR ambiguity, inherent speckle, and wake clutters. Besides, internal weak scatters in target region bring challenge to detect complete ship profiles. A homogenized saliency map is generated for ship detection. The speckle and background clutter are suppressed and the vessel sea contrast is greatly increased. And more complete targets profiles can be obtained while a lower false alarm rate is assured. The experiment results over real TerraSAR-X data validate its effectiveness.