Ship Detection Based on Superpixelwise Local Contrast Measurement for PolSAR Images

To reduce the influence of speckle noise on the pixel-level target detection method, a novel ship detection method is proposed for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PoISAR) images based on superpixelwise local contrast measurement. In the proposed method, superpixels are firstly generated based on the improved simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) method for polarimetric SAR image. Then the local contrast measurement is calculated between a certain superpixel and its neighborhood superpixels to enhance the discriminability between ship targets and clutter background. Thus, better target detection performance can be obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed method can be demonstrated by experiments on both quad-polarized and dual-polarized real SAR images.