Spatial Singularity-Exponent-Domain Multiresolution Imaging-Based SAR Ship Target Detection Method

A novel spatial singularity-exponent-domain multiresolution imaging (SSMRI) method is proposed in this article. It is aimed at improving the image processing ability for the single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR), thereby acquiring the robust image feature for SAR target detection at the very low SNR. Combining the 2-D singularity power spectrum (SPS) and the 2-D pseudo-Wigner–Ville distribution (PWVD), the SSMRI method is derived. Consequently, the single-channel SAR images are transformed to obtain spatial multiresolution SAR images with respect to the singularity exponent. Furthermore, the separability of the SAR image target in the space of the singularity exponent is analyzed, and the separability theorem in the sense of SSMRI is proved. In particular, under the background of GWN and fractal noise, the separability of SAR image targets based on SSMRI processing is studied. In addition, the stability and robustness of SSMRI-SAR feature extraction are demonstrated. On this basis, a maritime SAR ship target detection method based on SSMRI is put forward in the extremely low SNR condition. The experiment results on the SAR-Ship-Dataset indicate that the proposed method is superior in performance to the traditional CFAR or 2-D-SPS method. Especially when SNR = −30 dB, the detection performance with more than 99.4% can be achieved.