Current trends in ship detection in spaceborne synthetic aperture radar imagery.

A review of publicly available literature concerning ship detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. The aim of this work is to identify methods applicable to real-time on-board ship detection on the new generation ICEYE SAR microsatellites. This implies a focus on detection methods working with single-polarization imagery, for both raw SAR signal as well as processed imagery. Algorithms leveraging high degrees of parallelization are of particular interest due to the employment of a high-performance FPGA in the satellite's processing unit. The standard approach to SAR ship detection consists of two steps: pre-screening and discrimination which is often expanded into vessel classification. Both these steps are taken into account and recommendations of ship detection methods for ICEYE's satellites are presented.