A New Image Fusion Method for Ship Target Enhancement in Spaceborne and Airborne SAR Collaboration

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the fusion of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and airborne SAR images and its application to ship target enhancement. In this paper, we propose a new target proposal and clutter copula (TPCC)-based image fusion method for the collaboration of spaceborne and airborne SARs. TPCC enhances the common ship target areas in spaceborne and airborne SAR images via the intersection of target proposals and suppresses the clutter areas by establishing the joint distribution of clutter in the spaceborne and airborne SAR images based on the copula theory. Compared with other commonly used image fusion methods, the target dependence and clutter dependence in the spaceborne and airborne SAR images are newly exploited in TPCC. We demonstrate the superiority of TPCC in terms of target-to-clutter ratios (TCRs) by using composite images combining Gaofen-3 satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) SAR images.