Performance Comparison Between Reflection Symmetry Metric and Product of Multilook Amplitudes for Ship Detection in Dual-Polarization SAR Images

The reflection symmetry metric (RSM) and product of multilook amplitudes (PMA) detectors, which were proposed recently, have been demonstrated to be promising methods for processing dual-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for ship detection. The improvements in ship detection performance by using the RSM, compared to that using the PMA, are investigated in this paper. As the ship-sea contrast (or the signal-clutter-ratio, SCR) is a central index to assess the performance of a detection method, the SCRs in the RSM and PMA are first defined and compared. Next, a theoretical explanation for why the RSM outperforms the PMA in detection performance is provided. The detection performance is then characterized by calculating the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The preliminary experimental results performed on measured RADARSAT-2, ALOS-PALSAR, and NASA/JPL AIRSAR images verify the accuracy of the theoretical analysis.