Ship detection in SAR images: A segmentation-based approach

This paper deals with the problem of detecting ship targets in medium and high resolution SAR images. Achieving a controlled false alarm rate is a major problem for the presence of a highly non-homogeneous sea clutter environment due to the highly variable environmental and weather conditions in closely spaced areas. After highlighting the problems of conventional techniques, a new approach is proposed based on cascading a segmentation stage and a local CFAR detection stage. The former estimates the homogeneous back-scattering regions, while the latter detects the ship targets inside the fairly homogeneous identified regions.