Résumé
This study addresses the use of dual-polarimetric descriptors for ship detection and characterization from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. Ship detection is usually performed independently on each polarization channel and the results are merged subsequently. We propose to extract polarimetric descriptors from the two polarization channels and to perform the vessel detection the vessels in this domain. Several polarimetric descriptors, such as those derived from the the Eigenvector-Eigenvalue decomposition, are employed for this purpose. A comparative assessment between the use of intensity images and polarimetric descriptors for the detection and identification of ships is then realized. The proposed methodology is tested on Sentinel-1 data acquired over the English channel. Automatic Identification System (AIS) data flows are considered as ground truth.