Subaperture analysis of polarimetric SAR data for iceberg detection

This paper is focused on investigations of the improved detection of icebergs in open water using spectral analysis of polarimetric SAR data. The objectives of this study are to analyze the behavior of ice objects in open water using the sublook cross-correlation magnitude (SCM). It is shown that there is an improvement of iceberg-sea contrast when the SCM is used instead of multilook intensities from the full-bandwidth data. The subband extraction in the azimuth dimension is used to test the stability of icebergs when they are observed by different azimuth view angles (i.e., looking fore or aft). Experiments are performed on full-polarimetric single-look complex (SLC) SAR data containing icebergs in open water. The results indicate that the sublook analysis has a impact on detection performance.