A Comparative Study of Operational Vessel Detectors for Maritime Surveillance using Satellite-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar

This paper presents a comparative study among four operational detectors that work by automatically postprocessing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images acquired from the satellite platforms RADARSAT-2 and COSMOSkyMed. Challenging maritime scenarios have been chosen to assess the detectors’ performance against features such as ambiguities, significant sea clutter or irregular shorelines. The SAR images which form the test data are complemented with ground-truth to define the reference detection configuration, which permits quantifying the Probability of Detection (PoD), the False Alarm Rate (FAR) and the accuracy of estimating ship dimensions. Although the results show that all the detectors perform well, there is no perfect detector, and a better detection system could be developed that combines the best elements from each of the single detectors. Beyond the pure comparison exercise, the study has permitted improving the detectors by pointing weaknesses out and providing means for fixing them.

STASOLLA Mattia;  MALLORQUI Jordi;  MARGARIT Gerard;  SANTAMARIA SERNA Carlos;  WALKER Nick; 

2016-08-04

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC

JRC101032

1939-1404,   

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7498586,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC101032,   

10.1109/JSTARS.2016.2551730,