Multi-Channel Synthetic Aperture Radar Based Classification of Maritime Scenes

We present novel experimental evidence that demonstrates the effectiveness of exploiting scene motion information for the analysis of scene structure in maritime imaging applications. We analyze data captured by our novel airborne Multi-channel SAR (MSAR) system that is particularly suited to sampling the velocity profile of scatterers in the maritime environment. While previous works have shown the utility MSAR systems for correcting scene motion induced blurring artifacts, our work shows, for the first time, how the information furnished by an MSAR system can systematically render accurate classification of maritime scenes into different perceptual categories. We offer a methodology that is superior to traditional classification techniques that are based purely on the spatial structure of an image. Furthermore, the simplicity of the feature space involved together with the demonstrated classification performance on imagery captured by our airborne MSAR system underscore the strength of the methodology.