Detection of weak ship signals with the optimization of polarimetric contrast enhancement

An optimization of polarimetric contrast enhancement method is proposed to detect ships with lowship-to-clutter power ratio.The received power is calculated with Kennaugh matrix and an iterative algo-rithm is adopted to get the optimal polarimetric states.The optimization method depresses the power of o-cean clutter and increases the power of ship signal.With the double effects,the contrast of ship to oceanis dramatically increased.Thus small ship or weak signals of low ship-to-ocean power ratio can easily bedetected.Ship signals can be distinguished from speckle noise using the different variation trend after op-timization,and thus the threshold problem can be avoided.Moreover,the analyses of different ship’sKennaugh matrices give two implications.One is that the results are affected little by choosing differentKennaugh matrices of ships with strong intensity from Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR)images.The otheris that ship’s Kennaugh matrix chosen from real SAR images is more favorable than that of ideal scatter-ing.Finally,the optimization results are confirmed by polarimetric scattering angle and co-polarizationphase difference.