Simplified Power-Based Detectors for Ship Detection of PolSAR Imagery

Ship detection of polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) imagery has attracted lots of attentions in recent years. Also, it is known that among the polarimetric channels $HH, HV$ , and $VV, VV$ is the most sensitive to sea clutter. Following this guidance, in this paper, a novel ship detector SVVS is first proposed via subtracting the term $C_{33}$ from the total power detector SPAN. And then, the complect polarimetric covariance difference matrix [ $CP$ ] is utilized to calculate SVVS, leading to the construction of another novel ship detector $\text{SVVS}_{CP}$ . Finally, we investigate the statistical distribution of sea clutter with $\text{SVVS}_{CP}$ and further develop an adaptive $\text{SVVS}_{CP}$ -based C-FAR detector for ship detection. The experiment carried out on one real PolSAR imagery shows that, compared to SPAN, both SVVS and $\text{SVVS}_{CP}$ hold better ship detection performances.