A novel method for speckle noise reduction and ship target detection in SAR images

It is very difficult to detect small targets when the scattering intensity of background clutter is as strong as the targets and the speckle noise is serious in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Because the scattering of man-made objects lasts for a longer time than that of background clutter in azimuth malching scope, it is much easier for man-made objects to produce strong coherence than ground objects. As the essence of SAR imaging is coherent imaging, the contrast between targets and background clutter can be enhanced via coherent processing of SAR images. This paper proposes a novel method to reduce speckle noise for SAR images and to improve the detected ratio for SAR ship targets from the SAR imaging mechanism. This new method includes the coherence reduction speckle noise (CRSN) algorithm and the coherence constant false-alarm ratio (CCFAR) detection algorithm. Real SAR image data is used to test the presented algorithms and the experimental results verify that they are feasible and effective. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved