A refined ship segmentation method in SAR imagery

Precise segmentation is crucial for the feature extraction and classification of ships in SAR imagery. To alleviate the Doppler shift and the cross ambiguity, this paper propose to segment the ship area from its background based on the radon transform. Assuming that the region of interest (ROI) of ship in SAR imagery has been extracted, the detail procedures of the proposed refined segmentation can be summarized as follows. First, the ship’s ROI image is transformed to radon domain, in which pixel intensities are cumulated along different directions. Then, the peak areas are separated to extract the ship’s orientation and the main image area of the ship that orthogonal to the principal axis. Finally, the refined segmentation is achieved in the main image area. Experiments, accomplished over measured medium and high resolution SAR ship images, show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.