An automatic K-Wishart distribution ship detector for PolSAR data

This paper presents an automatic ship detection algorithm for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. Based on the non-Gaussian K-Wishart distribution model for complex backscattering coefficients, the PolSAR image is clustered automatically by a modified expectation maximization algorithm. A goodness-of-fit test is incorporated to improve the model fitness of the cluster iteratively. Then, the SPAN of ship cluster center is used to detect ships. Finally, the experimental results of a real measured UAVSAR dataset show that the proposed algorithm could improve the ability of weak target detection while reduces the rate of false alarm and miss detections.