Ship Detection in Terrasar-x High-resolution Spotlight Dual-polarisation Imagery

This paper addresses ship detection in TerraSAR-X single-look high-resolution spotlight data by using a global thresholding approach, which is based on statistical analysis of the test data. The corresponding thresholds were determined separately from the exponential and chi-squared distributions for TerraSAR-X single-polarisation (HH or VV) and dual-polarisation (HH and VV) data. From the results, all ship targets were successfully detected for different inputs, namely HH polarisation, VV polarisation, and dual-polarisation. The use of the dualpolarisation input was found to provide slightly better detection results of ship targets compared with the singlepolarisation inputs. The visibility and detection of a small boat in the TerraSAR-X high-resolution spotlight data are also discussed in this paper.