Novel method for extraction of ship target with overlaps in SAR image via EM algorithm

The quality of synthetic aperture radar(SAR)image degrades in the case of multiple imaging projection planes(IPPs)and multiple overlapping ship targets,and then the performance of target classification and recognition can be influenced.For addressing this issue,a method for extracting ship targets with overlaps via the expectation maximization(EM)algorithm is pro-posed.First,the scatterers of ship targets are obtained via the target detection technique.Then,the EM algorithm is applied to extract the scatterers of a single ship target with a single IPP.Afterwards,a novel image amplitude estimation approach is pro-posed,with which the radar image of a single target with a sin-gle IPP can be generated.The proposed method can accom-plish IPP selection and targets separation in the image domain,which can improve the image quality and reserve the target information most possibly.Results of simulated and real mea-sured data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.