Ship Target Detection Method Based on Local Saliency Enhancement

Abstract

Due to the non-uniformity of ship target scattering, speckle noises and side lobes, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship target detection is facing great challenges. Therefore, to improve the detection performance in this scenario, the ship detection method based on the local saliency enhancement is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the proposed method improves the target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) by combining the relative differences of multi-features between ship target and the clutter background, and the threshold segmentation is performed based on the final local enhancement results. The experimental results show that the proposed method can suppress clutter background and speckle noises, improve the TCR and the algorithm has a high detection rate and a low false alarm rate in the complex background and multi-target marine environment.