Offshore Oil Platform Detection in Polarimetric SAR Images Using Level Set Segmentation of Limited Initial Region and Convolutional Neural Network

Offshore oil platforms are difficult to detect due to the complex sea state, the sparseness of target distribution, and the similarity of targets with ships. In this paper, we propose an oil platform detection method in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images using level set segmentation of a limited initial region and a convolutional neural network (CNN). Firstly, to reduce the interference of sea clutter, the offshore strong scattering targets were initially detected by the generalized optimization of polarimetric contrast enhancement (GOPCE) detector. Secondly, to accurately locate the contour of targets and eliminate false alarms, the coarse results were refined using an improved level set segmentation method. An algorithm for splitting and merging the smallest enclosing circle (SMSEC) was proposed to cover the coarse results and obtain the initial level set function. Finally, the LeNet-5 CNN model was used to classify the oil platforms and ships. Experimental results using multiple sets of polarimetric SAR data acquired by RADARSAT-2 show that the performance of the proposed method, including the detection rate, the false alarm rate, and the Intersection over Union (IOU) index between the extracted ROI and the ground truth, is better than the performance of a method that combines a GOPCE detector and a support vector machine classifier.