Ship detection in Sentinel-1 imagery using the H-dome transformation

The advancement of ship detections is an important focus of Maritime Domain Awareness. Improvements in both speed and correctness responses to events can be made by introducing new ship detection methods. Sentinel-1 imagery has recently been released for public usage and with it the chance to test new methods on current data. By exploiting the fact that ships are locally bright objects, this paper presents a method for ship detection within Sentinel-1 imagery using the H-dome transform. This transformation, typically used to highlight sub-cellular structures in biology, can be used to flatten clutter around the ship and highlight the brightest section of ships. The method was tested against two Sentinel-1 images in both HH and HV polarization with a total of 82 ships. The method provided improved FAR over the conventional CA-CFAR method at the cost of slightly worse detection accuracies. Future work includes using the method as auxiliary data in other ship detection methods.