An Improved Superpixel-Level CFAR Detection Method for Ship Targets in High-Resolution SAR Images

To achieve efficient ship detection in high-resolution synthetic aperture radar images, an improved superpixel-level constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection method is proposed with three modifications. First, the weighted information entropy (WIE) describes the statistical characteristics of superpixels, yielding a better distinction between target and clutter superpixels. Second, a two-stage CFAR detection scheme is proposed to detect target superpixels, including global detection and local detection. Specifically, the WIE-based global detector is utilized to prescreen candidate target superpixels (CTSs) and then the local CFAR detector is adaptively conducted over the selected CTSs to refine target superpixels. Third, the superpixels selected by the global detection can be excluded as outliers for clutter estimation, thus the disturbance from adjacent targets in multitarget situations can be reduced and more accurate detection results can be obtained. Compared with CFAR methods implemented with the sliding window technique, the computational burden of the proposed method is significantly reduced without loss of detection performance. Experiments of ship detection on three TerraSAR-X datasets are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.