Ship detection with quad polarimetric TerraSAR-X data: An adaptive notch filter

Ship detection is a key topic for the surveillance of coastal areas and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) presents an advantageous technology for this application, because the observations cover relatively large areas and are independent of atmospheric cloud conditions and solar illumination. Recently a new generation of satellites has become available with enhanced SAR capabilities and our algorithm detects vessels by exploiting the difference between the polarimetric SAR signature of sea clutter and ships. In this paper, the algorithm that was originally used with SAR data at the C-Band frequency has been enhanced for use with high resolution X-band data such as TerraSAR-X. Moreover a dual polarimetric version of the algorithm is proposed, which has associated costs and benefits that are interesting to compare with the quad polarimetric counterpart.