PolSAR-Ap: the use of polarimetric SAR to improve detection of targets at sea

Ship detection is an important topic for security and surveillance of maritime and coastal areas. A solution exploiting satellite SAR sensors is particularly interesting, because it offers wide scale surveillance capabilities, which are not reliant on solar illumination and are independent of the weather conditions ([1, 2, 3]). SAR polarimetry has a valuable contribution in improving ship detection capabilities ([2, 4]). The ship detection contribution in PolSAR-Ap aims at demonstrating the benefits of exploiting polarimetry compared to algorithms making use of one single channel. For this reason, several detectors were compared over surveyed data and the probabilities of detection and false alarm were estimated.