Adaptive CFAR Method for SAR Ship Detection Using Intensity and Texture Feature Fusion Attention Contrast Mechanism

Due to the complexity of sea surface environments, such as speckles and side lobes of ships, ship wake, etc., the detection of ship targets in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is still confronted with enormous challenges, especially for small ship targets. Aiming at the key problem of ship target detection in the complex environments, the article proposes a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) algorithm for SAR ship target detection based on the attention contrast mechanism of intensity and texture feature fusion. First of all, the local feature attention contrast enhancement is performed based on the intensity dissimilarity and the texture feature difference described by local binary pattern (LBP) between ship targets and sea clutter, so as to realize the target enhancement and background suppression. Furthermore, the adaptive CFAR ship target detection method based on generalized Gamma distribution (GFD) which can fit the clutter well by the goodness-of-fit analyses is carried out. Finally, the public datasets HRSID and LS-SSDD-v1.0 are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed detection method. A large number of experimental results show that the proposed method can suppress clutter background and speckle noise and improve the target-to-clutter rate (TCR) significantly, and has the relative high detection rate and low false alarm rate in the complex p background and multi-target marine environments.

Automated summary

This study proposes a SAR ship target detection CFAR algorithm based on the attention contrast mechanism of intensity and texture feature fusion, which effectively enhances targets and suppresses background, as well as adapts well to clutter background with an adaptive CFAR method based on generalized Gamma distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that the method has a relatively high detection rate and low false alarm rate in complex marine environments, improving target-to-clutter ratio significantly.