Adaptive ship detection in SAR images using variance WIE-based method

Automatic detection of ship targets from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is an important and challenging problem. Given the different nature of target returns in homogeneous and heterogeneous regions in SAR imagery, conventional detection algorithms fail to yield automatic and robust results. In support of automatic vessel monitoring, an adaptive detection framework designed for detecting ships from SAR imagery is proposed in this paper, and the variance weighted information entropy is introduced into the framework construction. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively detect the ship targets from various circumstances without any prior knowledge.