Ship detection on open sea and coastal environment

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a high-resolution ground-mapping technique with the ability to effectively synthesize a large radar antenna by processing the phase of a smaller radar antenna on a moving platform like an airplane or a satellite. SAR images, due to its properties, have been the focus of many applications such as land and sea monitoring, remote sensing, mapping of surfaces, weather forecasting, among many others. Their relevance is increasing on a daily basis, thus it’s crucial to apply the best suitable method or technique to each type of data collected. Several techniques have been published in the literature so far to enhance automatic ship detection using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, like multilook imaging techniques, polarization techniques, Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) techniques, Amplitude Change Detection (ACD) techniques among many others. Depending on how the information is gathered and processed, each technique presents different performance and results. Nowadays there are several ongoing SAR missions, and the need to improve ship detection, oil-spills or any kind of sea activity is fundamental to preserve and promote navigation safety as well as constant and accurate monitoring of the surroundings, for example, detection of illegal fishing activities, pollution or drug trafficking. The main objective of this MSc dissertation is to study and implement a set of algorithms for automatic ship detection using SAR images from Sentinel-1 due to its characteristics as well as its ease access. The dissertation organization is as follows: Chapter 1 presents a brief introduction to the theme of this dissertation and its aim, as well as its structure; Chapter 2 summarizes a variety of fundamental key points from historical events and developments to the SAR theory, finishing with a summary of some well-known ship detection methods; Chapter 3 presents a basic guideline to choose the best ship detection technique depending on the data type and operational scenario; Chapter 4 focus on the CFAR technique detailing the implemented algorithms. This technique was selected, given the data set available for testing in this work; Chapter 5 presents the results obtained using the implemented algorithms; Chapter 6 presents the conclusions, final remarks and future work