A Ship Detection and Imagery Scheme for Airborne Single-Channel SAR in Coastal Regions

Ship detection and management in coastal regions are challenging tasks due to the complex appearances of ships and the background. For further applications in the context of fisheries monitoring and vessel traffic services, a single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is mounted on a number of maneuvering and inexpensive rotor platforms, which are utilized according to the consideration of flexible observation, cost savings, weight, and space constraints. In this paper, a hierarchical scheme of ship detection, ship imaging, and classification is proposed. It mainly includes three parts. First, a mixture statistical model of semi-parametric K-lognormal distribution based on adaptive background windows with a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) is proposed for ship prescreening in SAR imagery. Then, the discrimination stage, combined with ship imaging via the difference between the true ship targets and the false ones in the aspects of micro-Doppler motion properties, is performed. Finally, the simulation and field data processing results are presented to validate the proposed scheme.