Using Low-Resolution SAR Scattering Features for Ship Classification

This letter reports an experimental study aimed at establishing the questionable usefulness of scattering attributes for ship classification from moderate-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. About 2700 example images representing four ship types have been extracted from the OpenSARShip annotated dataset and used to form the training and test sets for random forest models. After importance ranking and cross-validation, different subsets of both geometric and scattering attributes were selected from a fixed training set and used to train the classifier. The results from the validation using the test sets show that the scattering attributes give a significant contribution in terms of overall classification accuracy.