An efficient ship detection method for KOMPSAT-5 synthetic aperture radar imagery based on adaptive filtering approach

Ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery has long been an active research topic and has many applications. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for detecting ships from SAR imagery using filtering. This method exploits ship masking using a median filter that considers maximum ship sizes and detects ships from the reference image, to which a Non-Local means (NL-means) filter is applied for speckle de-noising and a differential image created from the difference between the reference image and the median filtered image. As the pixels of the ship in the SAR imagery have sufficiently higher values than the surrounding sea, the ship detection process is composed primarily of filtering based on this characteristic. The performance test for this method is validated using KOMPSAT-5 (Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite-5) SAR imagery. According to the accuracy assessment, the overall accuracy of the region that does not include land is 76.79%, and user accuracy is 71.31%. It is demonstrated that the proposed detection method is suitable to detect ships in SAR imagery and enables us to detect ships more easily and efficiently.