Targets observation at sea exploiting reflection symmetry extracted from X-band dual-polarimetric SAR data

A polarimetric model to observe metallic targets at sea in dual-polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is here first investigated in X-band. The model gives an understanding of the different symmetry properties that characterize sea surface with and without metallic targets in terms of the correlation between like-and cross-polarized channels. Following the sensitivity study, a simple and very effective filter is designed to observe targets at sea. The model is tested on both HH/HV and VV/VH Single look Slant range Complex (SSC) dual-polarimetric TerraSAR-X data and the filter's outputs are verified against available Automatic Identification System (AIS) ground truth messages.