On the use of polarization phase information for ship detection

Fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data has been found to have many potential marine applications. This paper investigates in the polarization phase information for ship detection using Space-borne Imaging Radar-C/X-band SAR (SIR-C/X-SAR) data. It is shown that there exits large difference in polarization phase between ships and sea surface. The HH-VV polarization phase difference has largest ship-sea contrast among all polarization phase differences. An algorithm for ship detection has been proposed based on the ship-sea contrast in polarization phase information. The results have indicated that the polarization phase difference information can be used to detect ships with high accuracy.