Vessel Parameter Estimation with Quadratic Matched Filter for Compact-Polarimetric SAR

Traditional dual-polarimetric (DP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) modes have been preferred over fullypolarimetric (FP) modes for wide-area maritime applications due to their significantly larger swath width. The latest Canadian SAR mission, known as the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), also offers new compact-polarimetric (CP) modes that provide the same large area coverage as DP modes. However, unlike DP, CP SAR also provides the relative phase that is sensitive to odd and even bounce scattering. Methods for vessel detection are typically derived from statistical theory. Unfortunately, the most practically feasible detector for vessels, known as the Polarimetric Whitening Filter (PWF), is suboptimum since it does not incorporate any information about the target. Recently, a detector known as Quadratic Matched Filter (QMF) has been introduced that incorporates partial target information and has been shown to perform better than PWF. To be practically feasible, the target information utilized by QMF needs to be either known a priori or estimated from the data. To that end, this paper presents an efficient method for vessel parameter estimation for QMF with CP SAR.