A Look on Ships Detection techniques using SAR Images

Several techniques have been studied, invented and reformulated to enhance automatic ships detection using SAR images. Depending on how the information is gathered and processed each technique presents different performances and results. Nowadays there are several missions on going, and the need to get better results in ships detection, oil-spills or any kind of sea activity is fundamental to preserve and promote navigation safety as well as a constant and accurate monitoring of the surroundings for, for example, illegal fishing activities, pollution or drug trafficking. This paper is written in the context of a MSc dissertation which the purpose of looking on a full hand of recent and most used techniques for ships detection and summarizing them in terms of basic principles, advantages and disadvantages and performance in order to provide a basis guideline to choose which technique shall provide the best and more promising results for a task at hands and also give a practical example on Sentinel data set material.