Abstract:

In view of the high false alarm rate problem of the existed harbor detection method based on two-region segmentation and single-direction jetties scanning in synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a harbor detection method based on multi-region segmentation and multi-direction jetties scanning is proposed. The land covers are segmented to water region, strong backscattering man-made building and other land region using the multi-region level set segmentation in polarimetric SAR based on the statistic characteristics of the coherency matrix at first. Then the regions of interest (ROIs) of harbor along the coastline are extracted from the sea-land segmentation result using the proposed multi-direction jetties scanning method. Finally, man-made harbors and some false naturally formed rugged terrains in the ROIs are distinguished according to the segmentation result of strong scattering buildings. Experimental results show that using polarimetric data acquired by RADARSAT-2 over some areas of Singapore and Zhangjiang of China to test the proposed method, man-made harbors along the coast are almost all correctly detected.