Performance analysis of time-frequency technique for the detection of small ships in SAR imagery at large grazing angle and moderate metocean conditions

Kurzfassung

This paper addresses the performance of time-frequency based techniques for the detection of small ships (length less than 30m) under side-looking synthetic aperture radar (SAR) limiting conditions. The aim of this work is to assess this technique for improving TerraSAR-X (TS-X) near real time (NRT) ship detection service. The goals are achieved by processing both the co-polarized single look complex channels (HH and VV) of TS-X data where ships have been identified by their self-reporting messaging system. The results show that the target-to-clutter ratio does not improve significantly for the detection of small ships under the conditions investigated.