Ship detection in SAR images using efficient land masking methods

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has an important contribution in monitoring ships in the littoral regions. This stems from the substantial information that SAR images have which can facilitate the ships detection operation. Coastline images produced by SAR suffer from many deficiencies which arise from the presence of speckles and strong signals returned from land and rough sea. The first step in many ship detection systems is to mark and reject the land in SAR images (land masking). This is performed to reduce the number of false alarms that might be introduced if the land is processed by ship detector. In this paper, two powerful methods for land masking are introduced. One is based on mathematical morphology while the other is based on Lee-Jurkevich coastline detection and mean estimator algorithm. From experimental results, the proposed methods give promising results for both strongly marking the land area in SAR images and efficiently preserving the details of coastlines as well.