PolSAR Ship Detection Based on Polarimetric Correlation Pattern

For polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data, the correlation of two polarization channels is sensitive to the target orientation relative to the sensor's illumination direction. In this letter, the concept of polarimetric correlation pattern is proposed to explore this scattering diversity. The core idea is to extend the polarimetric correlation from a fixed angle to the rotation domain along the radar line of sight. A set of new polarimetric features are derived, and three features with high target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) are selected for PolSAR ship detection. The proposed ship detection method mainly contains three steps: the features selection, thresholding procedure, and morphological filtering. Experimental studies with Radarsat-2 and GaoFen-3 data validate the advantage of the proposed approach, especially for inshore dense ship discrimination.