A Method to Suppress False Alarms of Sentinel-1 to Improve Ship Detection

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based ship detection application, false alarms frequently occur due to various noises caused by the radar imaging process. Among them, radio frequency interference (RFI) and azimuth smearing produce substantial false alarms; the latter also yields longer length estimation of ships than the true length. These two noises are prominent at cross-polarization and relatively weak at co-polarization. However, in general, the cross-polarization data are suitable for ship detection, because the radar backscatter from background sea surface is much less in comparison with the co-polarization backscatter, i.e., higher ship-sea image contrast. In order to improve the ship detection accuracy further, the RFI and azimuth smearing need to be mitigated. In the present letter, Sentinel-1 VV- and VH-polarization intensity data are used to show a novel technique of removing these noises. In this method, median image intensities of noises and background sea surface are calculated to yield arithmetic tendency. A band-math formula is then designed to replace the intensities of noise pixels in VH-polarization with adjusted VV-polarization intensity pixels that are less affected by the noises. To verify the proposed method, the adaptive threshold method (ATM) with a sliding window was used for ship detection, and the results showed that the 74.39% of RFI false alarms are removed and 92.27% false alarms of azimuth smearing are removed.