Multi-dimensional coherent Time-Frequency analysis for ship detection in polsar imagery

This paper proposes an algorithm for ship detection in complex scenes using multi-dimensional coherent Time-Frequency (TF) techniques and dual-polarization SAR data. The PolSAR multi-dimensional information is analysed by means of a linear TF decomposition approach which permits to describe the ship and background area polarimetric behaviour for different azimuth angles of observation and frequencies of illumination. A statistic descriptor related to the signal polarimetric coherence in the TF domain, is used for ship detection in different backgrounds, including the environments with presence of strong ghost ambiguities or small natural islands. Using polarimetric RADARSAT-2 data, experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of this method.