Exploitation of Cosmo SkyMed SAR images for maritime traffic surveillance

Moving targets often appear defocussed in SAR images due to their relative motion with respect to the stationary scene. In several applications that require target classification and/or recognition an unfocussed image of a target would likely lead to misclassification, therefore decreasing classification performance. In this paper the authors present a new tool for automatically detecting and refocussing maritime moving targets starting from satellite Single Look Complex (SLC) SAR images. Preliminary results obtained by applying the proposed technique to Cosmo SkyMed (CSK) SLC SAR images show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.