Estimating the Alpha-Stable Distribution Parameters for Ship Detection in Polarimetric SAR Images

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, ship-sea contrast can be significantly improved when the polarimetric information is used, compared with information from a single channel SAR. The constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection algorithm based on the alpha-stable (AS) distribution model is a descent method for ship detection in sea. The most important step in this method is the parameter estimation of the AS probability density function for which the method of log-cumulants (MoLC) parameter estimation is proposed and utilized in this study. Evaluation results of the proposed method on two L- and C-band polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) datasets which are acquired by AIRSAR and RADARSAT-2 sensors confirm the accuracy of the method. Experimental results show that the best results of detection maps are achieved when the polarimetric span and entropy data are used where a high detection accuracy in the latter cases are along with a low number of false alarms.