scholarly journals Sea Spike Suppression Method Based on Optimum Polarization Ratio in Airborne SAR Images

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3269
Author(s):  
Yawei Zhao ◽  
Jinsong Chong ◽  
Yan Li ◽  
Kai Sun ◽  
Xue Yang

In the condition of ocean observation for high-resolution airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), sea spikes will cause serious interference to SAR image interpretation and marine target detection. In order to improve the ability of target detection, it is necessary to suppress sea spikes in SAR images. However, there is no report on sea spike suppression methods in SAR images. As a step forward, a sea spike suppression method based on optimum polarization ratio in airborne SAR images is proposed in this paper. This method is only applicable to the situation where VV and HH dual-polarized SAR data containing sea spikes are acquired at the same time. By calculating the optimum polarization ratio, this method further obtains the difference image of the panoramic area accomplishing sea spike suppression. This method is applied to a field airborne X-band SAR data, including ocean waves, oil spills and ships. The results show that the sea spikes are well suppressed, the contrast of ocean waves and the contrast of oil spills are improved, and the false alarm rate of ship detection is reduced. The discussions on these results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively suppress sea spikes and improve the interpretability of SAR images.

Author(s):  
H. Ding

China’s first airborne SAR mapping system (CASMSAR) developed by Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping can acquire high-resolution and full polarimetric (HH, HV, VH and VV) Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. It has the ability to acquire X-band full polarimetric SAR data at a resolution of 0.5m. However, the existence of speckles which is inherent in SAR imagery affects visual interpretation and image processing badly, and challenges the assumption that conjugate points appear similar to each other in matching processing. In addition, researches show that speckles are multiplicative speckles, and most similarity measures of SAR image matching are sensitive to them. Thus, matching outcomes of SAR images acquired by most similarity measures are not reliable and with bad accuracy. Meanwhile, every polarimetric SAR image has different backscattering information of objects from each other and four polarimetric SAR data contain most basic and a large amount of redundancy information to improve matching. Therefore, we introduced logarithmically transformation and a stereo matching similarity measure into airborne full polarimetric SAR imagery. Firstly, in order to transform the multiplicative speckles into additivity ones and weaken speckles' influence on similarity measure, logarithmically transformation have to be taken to all images. Secondly, to prevent performance degradation of similarity measure caused by speckles, measure must be free or insensitive of additivity speckles. Thus, we introduced a stereo matching similarity measure, called Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC), into full polarimetric SAR image matching. Thirdly, to take advantage of multi-polarimetric data and preserve the best similarity measure value, four measure values calculated between left and right single polarimetric SAR images are fused as final measure value for matching. The method was tested for matching under CASMSAR data. The results showed that the method delivered an effective performance on experimental imagery and can be used for airborne SAR matching applications.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiangfei Wei ◽  
Jinsong Chong ◽  
Yawei Zhao ◽  
Yan Li ◽  
Xiaonan Yao

Ocean waves are the richest texture on the sea surface, from which valuable information can be inversed. In general, the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of surface waves will inevitably be distorted due to the intricate motion of surface waves. However, commonly used imaging algorithms do not take the motion of surface waves into consideration. Therefore, surface waves on the obtained SAR images are rather blurred. To solve this problem, an airborne SAR imaging algorithm for ocean waves based on optimum focus setting is proposed in this paper. Firstly, in order to obtain the real azimuth phase speed of dominant wave, the geometric and scanning distortion in the blurred SAR image is calibrated. Subsequently, according to the SAR integration time and wavelength of the dominant wave, a proper focus setting variation section is selected. Afterwards, all the focus settings in this variation section are used to refocus the image, which are then compared to decide the optimum focus setting for dominant wave. Finally, by redesigning the azimuth matched filter using this optimum focus setting, a well-focused SAR image for the dominant wave can be obtained. The proposed algorithm is applied to both simulation and field data, and SAR images of surface waves are obtained. Furthermore, the obtained images are compared with those obtained with a zero-focus setting. The comparison shows that the focus of surface waves is significantly improved, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Finally, how to choose the appropriate focus setting variation section under different parameters and the applicability of the algorithm are analyzed.


Author(s):  
Xueqian Wang ◽  
Dong Zhu ◽  
Gang Li ◽  
Xiao-Ping Zhang ◽  
You He

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1643
Author(s):  
Ming Liu ◽  
Shichao Chen ◽  
Fugang Lu ◽  
Mengdao Xing ◽  
Jingbiao Wei

For target detection in complex scenes of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, the false alarms in the land areas are hard to eliminate, especially for the ones near the coastline. Focusing on the problem, an algorithm based on the fusion of multiscale superpixel segmentations is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the SAR images are partitioned by using different scales of superpixel segmentation. For the superpixels in each scale, the land-sea segmentation is achieved by judging their statistical properties. Then, the land-sea segmentation results obtained in each scale are combined with the result of the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector to eliminate the false alarms located on the land areas of the SAR image. In the end, to enhance the robustness of the proposed algorithm, the detection results obtained in different scales are fused together to realize the final target detection. Experimental results on real SAR images have verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 2686
Author(s):  
Di Wei ◽  
Yuang Du ◽  
Lan Du ◽  
Lu Li

The existing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image target detection methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable performance, but these methods require a large number of target-level labeled training samples to train the network. Moreover, some clutter is very similar to targets in SAR images with complex scenes, making the target detection task very difficult. Therefore, a SAR target detection network based on a semi-supervised learning and attention mechanism is proposed in this paper. Since the image-level label simply marks whether the image contains the target of interest or not, which is easier to be labeled than the target-level label, the proposed method uses a small number of target-level labeled training samples and a large number of image-level labeled training samples to train the network with a semi-supervised learning algorithm. The proposed network consists of a detection branch and a scene recognition branch with a feature extraction module and an attention module shared between these two branches. The feature extraction module can extract the deep features of the input SAR images, and the attention module can guide the network to focus on the target of interest while suppressing the clutter. During the semi-supervised learning process, the target-level labeled training samples will pass through the detection branch, while the image-level labeled training samples will pass through the scene recognition branch. During the test process, considering the help of global scene information in SAR images for detection, a novel coarse-to-fine detection procedure is proposed. After the coarse scene recognition determining whether the input SAR image contains the target of interest or not, the fine target detection is performed on the image that may contain the target. The experimental results based on the measured SAR dataset demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better performance than the existing methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 279
Author(s):  
Zhehao Yang ◽  
Weizeng Shao ◽  
Yuyi Hu ◽  
Qiyan Ji ◽  
Huan Li ◽  
...  

Marine oil spills occur suddenly and pose a serious threat to ecosystems in coastal waters. Oil spills continuously affect the ocean environment for years. In this study, the oil spill caused by the accident of the Sanchi ship (2018) in the East China Sea was hindcast simulated using the oil particle-tracing method. Sea-surface winds from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), currents simulated from the Finite-Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM), and waves simulated from the Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) were employed as background marine dynamics fields. In particular, the oil spill simulation was compared with the detection from Chinese Gaofen-3 (GF-3) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The validation of the SWAN-simulated significant wave height (SWH) against measurements from the Jason-2 altimeter showed a 0.58 m root mean square error (RMSE) with a 0.93 correlation (COR). Further, the sea-surface current was compared with that from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System Version 2 (CFSv2), yielding a 0.08 m/s RMSE and a 0.71 COR. Under these circumstances, we think the model-simulated sea-surface currents and waves are reliable for this work. A hindcast simulation of the tracks of oil slicks spilled from the Sanchi shipwreck was conducted during the period of 14–17 January 2018. It was found that the general track of the simulated oil slicks was consistent with the observations from the collected GF-3 SAR images. However, the details from the GF-3 SAR images were more obvious. The spatial coverage of oil slicks between the SAR-detected and simulated results was about 1 km2. In summary, we conclude that combining numerical simulation and SAR remote sensing is a promising technique for real-time oil spill monitoring and the prediction of oil spreading.


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