Ship Detection in SAR Image Based on the Alpha-stable Distribution 英文参考文献.docVIP

Sensors 2008, 8, 4948-4960; DOI: 10.3390/s8084948 OPEN ACCESS sensors ISSN 1424-8220 /sensors Article Ship Detection in SAR Image Based on the Alpha-stable Distribution Changcheng Wang 1, Mingsheng Liao 1,* and Xiaofeng Li 2 1 State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Survey, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS), Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei 430079, P. R. China 2 NOAA Science Center, WWBG, Room 102, 5200 Auth Road, Camp Springs, MD 20746, U.S.A. E-Mails: wchch1010@ (Changcheng Wang); liao@ (Mingsheng Liao); Xiaofeng.Li@ (Xiaofeng Li) * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Received: 19 June 2008; in revised form: 18 July 2008 / Accepted: 19 July 2008 / Published: 22 August 2008 Abstract: This paper describes an improved Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) ship detection algorithm in spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image based on Alpha- stable distribution model. Typically, the CFAR algorithm uses the Gaussian distribution model to describe statistical characteristics of a SAR image background clutter. However, the Gaussian distribution is only valid for multilook SAR images when several radar looks are averaged. As sea clutter in SAR images shows spiky or heavy-tailed characteristics, the Gaussian distribution often fails to describe background sea clutter. In this study, we replace the Gaussian distribution with the Alpha-stable distribution, which is widely used in impulsive or spiky signal processing, to describe the background sea clutter in SAR images. In our proposed algorithm, an initial step for detecting possible ship targets is employed. Then, similar to the typical two-parameter CFAR algorithm, a local process is applied to the pixel identified as possible target. A RADARSAT-1 image is used to validate this Alpha-stable distribution based algorithm. Meanwhile, known ship location data during the time of RADARSAT-1 SAR i