Comparative study on targets detection in high-resolution SAR images

Nowadays synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images offer a great potential in observing and monitoring the maritime environment and many efforts have been devoted on ship detection. Despite of the internal speckle noise and SAR ambiguities, the increased image resolution brings about new challenge for accurate ship detection. Four ship detection schemes are studied and compared in this paper: the CA-CFAR detector, the IC-CFAR detector, the Bilateral CFAR detector, and the proposed superpixel-based CAFR detection scheme. Their detection performances are evaluated in three aspects: detection rate, false alarm rate, and processing time. The experiment results over real TerraSAR-X data show that the proposed superpixel-based CFAR detection scheme outperforms the others for its steady performance.