A CA-CFAR and localized wavelet ship detector for Sentinel-1 imagery

The Maritime Domain Awareness initiative seeks to constantly improve the ways in which maritime information is collected. With the recent release of free Sentinel-1 imagery to the public, monitoring the maritime environment has become a more affordable. Using the basis of a cell-averaging constant false alarm rate prescreening method as input, this paper presents a novel method for detecting ships within Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery using a Gabor wavelet correlator. The method proposed allows for any configuration of the filter bank and prevents false detections by processing possible targets at a local scale. The method was tested against two Sentinel-1 images in both HH and HV polarization with a total of 82 ships. The method provided significantly improved FAR over the conventional CA-CFAR method at the cost of slightly worse detection accuracies in some cases. Future work includes further analysis of the method parameters to determine their effects on the performance of the proposed prescreening method.