Discussion on Application of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar in Marine Surveillance

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), an important earth observation sensor, has been used in a wide range of applications for land and marine surveillance. Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) can obtain abundant scattering information of a target to improve the ability of target detection, classification, and quantitative inversion. In this paper, the important role of PolSAR in ocean monitoring is discussed with factors such as sea ice, ships, oil spill, waves, internal waves, and seabed topography. Moreover, the future development direction of PolSAR is put forward to get an inspiration for further research of PolSAR in marine surveillance applications.