SAR imagery simulation of ship based on electromagnetic calculations and sea clutter modelling for classification applications

Abstract

Ship detection and classification with space-borne SAR has many potential applications within the maritime surveillance, fishery activity management, monitoring ship traffic, and military security. While ship detection techniques with SAR imagery are well established, ship classification is still an open issue. One of the main reasons may be ascribed to the difficulties on acquiring the required quantities of real data of vessels under different observation and environmental conditions with precise ground truth. Therefore, simulation of SAR images with high scenario flexibility and reasonable computation costs is compulsory for ship classification algorithms development. However, the simulation of SAR imagery of ship over sea surface is challenging. Though great efforts have been devoted to tackle this difficult problem, it is far from being conquered. This paper proposes a novel scheme for SAR imagery simulation of ship over sea surface. The simulation is implemented based on high frequency electromagnetic calculations methods of PO, MEC, PTD and GO. SAR imagery of sea clutter is modelled by the representative K-distribution clutter model. Then, the simulated SAR imagery of ship can be produced by inserting the simulated SAR imagery chips of ship into the SAR imagery of sea clutter. The proposed scheme has been validated with canonical and complex ship targets over a typical sea scene.