Title
Ship Detection Using a Fully Convolutional Network with Compact Polarimetric SAR Images.
Abstract
Compact polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (CP SAR), as a new technique or observation system, has attracted much attention in recent years. Compared with quad-polarization SAR (QP SAR), CP SAR provides an observation with a wider swath, while, compared with linear dual-polarization SAR, retains more polarization information in observations. These characteristics make CP SAR a useful tool in marine environmental applications. Previous studies showed the potential of CP SAR images for ship detection. However, false alarms, caused by ocean clutter and the lack of detailed information about ships, largely hinder traditional methods from feature selection for ship discrimination. In this paper, a segmentation method designed specifically for ship detection from CP SAR images is proposed. The pixel-wise detection is based on a fully convolutional network (i.e., U-Net). In particular, three classes (ship, land, and sea) were considered in the classification scheme. To extract features, a series of down-samplings with several convolutions were employed. Then, to generate classifications, deep semantic and shallow high-resolution features were used in up-sampling. Experiments on several CP SAR images simulated from Gaofen-3 QP SAR images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with Faster RCNN (region-based convolutional neural network), which is considered a popular and effective deep learning network for object detection, the newly proposed method, with precision and recall greater than 90% and a F-1 score of 0.912, performs better at ship detection. Additionally, findings verify the advantages of the CP configuration compared with single polarization and linear dual-polarization.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.3390/rs11182171
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
Field
DocType
compact polarimetric SAR,ship detection,fully convolutional network,semantic segmentation,Gaofen-3
Computer vision,Remote sensing,Artificial intelligence,Polarimetric sar,Geology
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
11
18
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qiancong Fan101.69
Feng Chen2134.45
Ming Cheng300.34
Shenlong Lou401.69
Rulin Xiao500.34
Biao Zhang69723.66
Cheng Wang721832.63
Jonathan Li8798119.18