Ship Segmentation in SAR Images by Improved Nonlocal Active Contour Model

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been widely used in ocean surveillance. As an important part of shipping management and military applications, ship monitoring is a study hotspot in SAR image interpretation; hence, many researches focus on ship targets. Among these studies, ship segmentation is a basic work, but still remains challenging due to the speckle noise and the complicated backscattering phenomenology in SAR images. To solve the problems, this paper proposes a new method for ship segmentation by nonlocal processing. Firstly, the proposed nonlocal energy describes the nonlocal comparison of patches and optimizes regions with spatially-varying features. Secondly, we rewrite the energy functional by introducing a ratio distance defined with respect to the probability density functions of regions to overcome the influence of the multiplicative noise. Finally, the integral histogram is introduced into the pairwise interactions to fasten the speed of convergence. Several rounds of comparative experiments are implemented on real SAR data with different resolutions and bands. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is robust to the speckle noise and intensity variations and could achieve refined segmentation for ship targets.