Ship Detection From PolSAR Imagery Using the Hybrid Polarimetric Covariance Matrix
Tao Zhang, Wei Wang, Zhen Yang, Junjun Yin, Jian Yang
Abstract
In this letter, we first investigate the relationship between polarimetric covariance matrix [C] and complete polarimetric covariance difference matrix [CP], and then construct a scattering difference parameter SDP. Subsequently, a hybrid polarimetric covariance matrix [HC] is developed based on SDP for curing the disadvantage of [CP], that is the scattering difference information of small ships cannot be well contained in [CP]. By fusing the feature “1-SDP” and the power detector SPAN <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HC</sub> derived from [HC] together, a novel ship detection method SPAN <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SDP</sub> is finally proposed to detect ships. Experiments performed on the airborne SAR (AIRSAR) L-Band and GF-3 C-Band data verify that 1) SPAN <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SDP</sub> can detect small ships more accurately than other state-of-the-art methods and 2) [HC] is more effective in improving ship detectors' detection performances in comparison with [CP].