Ship Detection From PolSAR Imagery Using the Hybrid Polarimetric Covariance Matrix

In this letter, we first investigate the relationship between polarimetric covariance matrix [C] and complete polarimetric covariance difference matrix [CP], and then construct a scattering difference parameter SDP. Subsequently, a hybrid polarimetric covariance matrix [HC] is developed based on SDP for curing the disadvantage of [CP], that is the scattering difference information of small ships cannot be well contained in [CP]. By fusing the feature "1-SDP" and the power detector SPAN(HC) derived from [HC] together, a novel ship detection method SPAN(SDP) is finally proposed to detect ships. Experiments performed on the airborne SAR (AIRSAR) L-Band and GF-3 C-Band data verify that 1) SPAN(SDP) can detect small ships more accurately than other state-of-the-art methods and 2) [HC] is more effective in improving ship detectors' detection performances in comparison with [CP].