Superpixel-guided CFAR Detection of Ships at Sea in SAR Imagery

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has over the years evolved to be one of the most promising remote sensing modalities for large-scale monitoring of the ocean and maritime activity. The detection of ships at sea in SAR imagery is a challenging task, as it requires the detection of small targets with little exploitable spatial information within a high resolution image. We present a novel method for the detection of ships based on superpixel segmentation and subsequent statistical characterisation, with no prior land masking. Our method acts as a bound to a CFAR detector, greatly reducing false positives. We present results on SENTINEL-1 imagery, demonstrating the detection performance of our algorithm