A Ship Detection and Tracking Algorithm for an Airborne Passive Interferometric Microwave Sensor (PIMS)

Ship detection by an airborne passive interferometric microwave sensor has been proposed as a powerful complementary tool for ship detection, especially for large ships in low visibility conditions and high sea clutter. In this article, the brightness temperature (TB) models of the sea background and the ship on the sea are established. Given the TB models, a ship detection and tracking algorithm with four steps is proposed, which is devoted to ship tracking. In addition, the impacts of the noises in the passive interferometric microwave images (PIMI) and the algorithm parameters are analyzed and discussed. Numerical simulations and airborne experiments are performed to assess the practicability of the algorithm. Both numerical and experimental results have demonstrated the practicability of the proposed algorithm with dealing with the additional systematic errors and estimating the ship heading, and the results also exhibit that the additional noises in the PIMI caused by the stochastic fluctuations of the aircraft and the algorithm parameters have a non-negligible impact on the algorithm detection performance. As a result, the “ship-free” observed TB maps should be carefully considered as the sea background TB map to improve the algorithm detection performance by reducing the noises caused by the stochastic fluctuations of the aircraft. In addition, the algorithm parameter should also be carefully considered to get a high ship detection probability with a low ship false-alarm rate.