Iceberg Detection Based on L-band Compact Polarimetric SAR

Iceberg monitoring is of great significance to navigation safety in polar region. This paper carried out iceberg detection research based on L-band Compact Polarimetric SAR. Firstly, the iceberg detection performance of 23 Compact Polarimetric SAR features in complex sea conditions was evaluated comprehensively by using three indexes of Euclidean distance, Bhattacharyya distance and target-background contrast. The Compact Polarimetric SAR features with better iceberg detection potential were screened out: the second eigenvalue
$\lambda_{2}$
of covariance matrix. Then, the polarization feature
$\lambda_{2}$
was used to detect iceberg by the generalized gamma distribution CFAR method. Compared with the classical single-polarization (BV-CFAR) and full-polarization (GNF) detection methods, the method proposed has a good detection performance for icebergs of different sizes in complex sea conditions, and the developed method has a good application prospect.