ABSTRACT Infrared‐visible image fusion enhances perceptual quality by integrating the detailed textures of visible images with the thermal target saliency of infrared images, making it highly valuable for applications such as military reconnaissance and autonomous driving. However, existing methods encounter three major limitations: performance degradation in unregistered scenarios due to non‐rigid deformations, restricted cross‐modal feature interaction caused by low‐order operations, and fusion distortions resulting from variations in object scale. To overcome these challenges, this study introduces a multi‐scale alignment and high‐order fusion network ( MAHF‐Net ). Under a shared cross‐modal multi‐scale encoding‐decoding framework, three novel components are introduced: an Infrared‐Guided Spatial Deformable Alignment (ISDA) module, a High‐Order Spatial‐Channel Interaction Block (HOSCIB), and a Cross‐Scale Dynamic Aggregation (CSDA) module. The ISDA module exploits infrared salient regions to generate spatial attention, which regulates offset fields that guide deformable convolution for adaptive non‐rigid deformation correction. The HOSCIB applies a high‐order spatial–channel joint interaction mechanism, enabling iterative feature refinement through dynamic spatial attention gating combined with cascaded channel attention. The CSDA module incorporates dynamically gated attention to balance semantic and detail contributions. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the RoadScene , LLVIP and AVIID datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed MAHF‐Net consistently outperforms state‐of‐the‐art registered and unregistered fusion methods, achieving mutual information improvements of 24.6% and 4.35%, respectively.

Azimuth ambiguity is a common issue in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imagery, particularly on calm and windless maritime surfaces, which causes numerous false alarms in ship detection. Numerous methods have been applied in single look complex (SLC) PolSAR imagery to suppress ambiguities. Nevertheless, identifying and removing azimuth ambiguities in multilook complex (MLC) PolSAR imagery remains an open problem. This letter proposes an azimuth ambiguity identification method for ship detection in multilook PolSAR imagery. The process is divided into two steps: potential target detection and ambiguity identification. First, the four-component scattering model (Y4O) proposed by Yamaguchi is utilized to decompose the multilook PolSAR image into four dominant scattering categories. Then, the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection is conducted based on the total scattering power to detect all potential targets. Azimuth ambiguities are identified according to the correlation coefficient between the measured and standard scattering power vectors. Eventually, the detection map is formed by removing azimuth ambiguities from the CFAR detection result. The proposed method is validated on RadarSAT-2 and Airborne SAR (AIRSAR) images.

It is often difficult to obtain sufficient training data for adaptive signal detection, which is required to calculate the unknown noise covariance matrix. Additionally, interference is frequently present, which complicates the detecting issue. We provide a two-step method, termed interference cancellation before detection (ICBD), to address the issue of signal detection in the unknown Gaussian noise and subspace interference. The first involves projecting the test and training data to the interference-orthogonal subspace in order to suppress the interference. Utilizing traditional adaptive detector design ideas is the next stage. Due to the smaller dimension of the projected data, the ICBD-based detectors can function with little training data. The ICBD has two additional benefits over traditional detectors. Lower computational burden and proper operation with interference being in the training data are two additional benefits of ICBD-based detectors over conventional ones. We also give the statistical properties of the ICBD-based detectors and demonstrate their equivalence with the traditional ones in the special case of a large amount of training data containing no interference.

A challenging issue in the field of marine remote sensing is the application of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) to small ship detection in complicated environments. Several outstanding polarimetric detectors (such as the optimal polarimetric detector, polarimetric whitening filter, and polarimetric notch filter, etc.), have been effectively implemented in practical applications. A linear combination model based on quadratic optimization is summarized to establish a general framework for polarimetric detectors, transitioning the PolSAR ship target detection from a model driven approach to a hybrid (model/data)-driven approach. However, the dimension of the covariance matrix may be high, and the computation cost will be large. The higher dimension of the covariance matrix requires a bigger the data demand. As a result, when the sample size is small, the model performance will degrade. In this paper, to decrease the computational complexity and improve the robustness, we propose a novel method called the simultaneous diagonalization transform (SDT). The proposed method enables an almost simplest representation of information from the covariance matrix providing a rapid detection algorithm. The simulation experiments demonstrate that polarimetric detectors based on SDT consistently outperform those based on other methods in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and sample size requirements across various complex backgrounds. Furthermore, the effectiveness, robust, and fastness of the polarimetric detector based on SDT is validated using real data collected by RadarSAT-2, GaoFen-3, and Sentinel-1A.

The polarimetric whitening filter (PWF) is widely used in constant false alarm rate (CFAR) ship detection in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imagery. The detection threshold plays a key role in the CFAR detection, which is generally determined by the statistical model of clutter. Many product models with different distributed textures are considered to fit the PWF output for an accurate threshold. Unfortunately, the product model with the general inverse Gaussian (G) texture, which can be namedG-Wishart model according to the polarimetric covariance matrix, has not been well studied for its effective calculation. In this letter, the probability density function (PDF), the probability of false alarm (PFA), and the threshold in the CFAR algorithm based on the PWF are all obtained corresponding to theGdistribution. The closed forms for the PDF and PFA are obtained with the Fox H function and its multivariate version, respectively. The threshold is derived by the bisection method when the false alarm rate (FAR) is constant. Finally, experimental results using both simulated and real data demonstrate that the different statistical models with the same log-cumulants can achieve almost the same CFAR loss.

Ship detection using polarimetric synthetic radar (PolSAR) imagery attracts a lot of attention in recent years. Most notably, the detector polarimetric notch filter (PNF) has been demonstrated to be effective for ship detection in PolSAR imagery, which gives excellent performances. In this work, a mathematical form of one new PNF (NPNF) based on physical mechanisms of targets and clutter is further developed for partial targets. The different mechanisms have been revealed based on the projection matrix. The experimental results including simulated and measured data demonstrate that the NPNF exhibits a better performance than the original PNF.

In order to detect ships from the imagery of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR), a neighborhood polarimetric covariance matrix (for simplicity, we call it [$N$] hereinafter) was recently constructed. However, its calculation process is time-consuming and the backscattering heterogeneity near ship edges is also not well considered. For curing these shortcomings, we here propose two novel superpixel-based neighborhood polarimetric covariance matrices. In brief, the first matrix denoted by [SN] uses the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) to yield superpixels, whereas in the second matrix denoted by [GN], the gradient operator Sobel is adopted to obtain superpixels. Based on these two different kinds of superpixels, then, two different feature vectors$v_{\text {SN}}$and$v_{\text {GN}}$are separately built to compute [SN] and [GN]. Experiments performed on the real PolSAR datasets show that, compared to [$N$], [SN] and [GN] can improve the performance of the polarimetric whitening filter (PWF) more significantly and the time consumptions of calculating [SN] and [GN] are both much less.

A novel polarimetric contrast enhancement method based on minimal clutter to signal ratio (MCSR) subspace was proposed for target detection. The latter is a typical trace ratio (TR) problem. In this article, a more effective iterative method is proposed to solve this problem. Moreover, a very simple and suboptimal method is also suggested by the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD), which performs better in ship detection.

Ship detection via synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been demonstrated to be very useful as polarimetric information helps discriminate between targets and sea clutter. Among the available polarimetric detectors, optimal polarimetric detection (OPD) theoretically provides the best detection performance under the assumption that the fully developed speckle hypothesis stands. This study proposes a polarimetric detection optimization filter (PDOF). The target clutter ratio (TCR) over the speckle variation was maximized using a matrix transform to derive the PDOF. The objective function based on a matrix transform instead of a vector transform is optimized to obtain synthetic effects by combining a polarimetric whitening filter (PWF) and a polarimetric matched filter (PMF). Subspace form of the PDOF (SPDOF) is also proposed, which gives performance comparable to the PDOF. Assuming a Wishart distribution, the exact and approximate expressions of the closed-form probability density function (PDF) of the PDOF are derived. The probability of false alarm (PFA) was derived in a closed-form expression, which allows obtaining the PDOF threshold analytically. Moreover, the gamma model is extended to a generalized gamma distribution ($\text{G}\Gamma \text{D}$) to adapt complicated resolutions and sea states. Experiments with simulated and real data validate the correctness and effectiveness of the results. The PDOF detector achieves the best performance in most virtual and real-world environments, especially in cases where the target statistics and clutter are not Wishart-distributed.

Ship detection is an important task in civil or military applications and we can use polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR). Many polarimetric detectors were proposed and achieved good performances in particular environments, such as optimal polarimetric detector (OPD), polarimetric whitening filter (PWF), polarimetric notch filter (PNF), polarimetric detection optimization filter (PDOF) and diagonal loading detector (DLD) etc. Up to know, the analytical links among different polarimetric detectors have not been found. In this work, the above polarimetric detectors are unified in mathematical forms and a general framework of polarimetric detectors based on quadratic optimization is presented. The mathematical forms are summarized as a trace of two matrices’ product. One is a detection transformation matrix and the other is the polarimetric covariance matrix of the pixel to be detected. We find that all these polarimetric detectors can be regarded as the optimization of such detection matrix, which is the key point of the general framework, and the difficulty turns to be a linear inseparable problem. Pocket Perceptron Linear Algorithm (PPLA) is used to solve the linear inseparable problem. In the case of low resolution, target detection is almost an indivisible problem, and multilayer perceptron (MLP) cannot provide better detection results than PPLA. In the case of high resolution, target detection becomes a nonlinear separable problem, and MLP is gradually superior to PPLA. Additionally, the optimal weights of the recent DLD are obtained to compare with other detectors in the general framework and the DLD is developed to a more general case (GDLD). The experiments validate the general framework of polarimetric detectors. Different detectors in the general framework are utilized and compared in both simulated and measured PolSAR data. The results show the optimal solution in the general framework can always reach the best performance, and the GDLD is the closest one to the optimal detector of the general framework.

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) is widely used in remote sensing and has important applications in the detection of ships. Although many polarimetric detectors have been proposed, they are not well combined. Recently, a polarimetric detection optimization filter (PDOF) was proposed, which performs well in most environments. In this study, a novel subspace form of the PDOF [strict PDOF (SPDOF)] was further developed based on the Cauchy inequality and matrix decomposition theories, enhancing detection performance. Furthermore, a simple method to determine the optimal dimension of the subspace detector based on the trace ratio form was proposed by calculating the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, reaching the best detection performance among the subspaces of the detector. Moreover, to combine different subspace detectors, a modified linear discriminant analysis was proposed and developed for the diagonal loading detector (DLD) based on polarimetric subspaces. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of these joint polarimetric subspace detectors. Most importantly, DLD solves for previous limitations due to the complex clutter background and achieves a performance comparable to that of the Wishart (Gaussian) distribution, particularly in the low target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) case.

The effects of ocean spectrum truncation on the sea clutter distribution properties in numerical simulations are studied using a recently developed full-wave method, i.e., the multilevel steepest decent - sparse matrix canonical grid (MLSD-SMCG) method and the KHCC03 spectrum. Two types of ocean surface profiles are generated for Monte Carlo simulations based on the full and truncated spectra at the wind speed of 10 m/s. The surface profiles generated by the truncated spectrum have lengths about 1/6 of those using full spectrum. 1000 realizations are conducted for each type of profiles. The simulations are illustrated at L-band (1.4 GHz) and the incidence angle is 40°. For the simulated far-field scattering fields and normalized radar cross sections (NRCS), we use the K-distribution model to fit the probability density functions (PDF) of the amplitude and backscatter of clutters. It is found that spectrum truncation has non-negligible effects on the distribution characteristics of sea clutter in the numerical simulations, particularly for the amplitude distributions. The fitted PDF indicates that the simulated sea clutter using truncated spectrum has more small values compared with that using full spectrum.

In a recent work, a neighborhood polarimetric covariance matrix [N] was proposed to detect ships from polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) imagery. However, its computational complexity is extremely high. Besides, the heterogeneity surrounding ship edges is also not well considered in [N]. To cure these draw-backs, we construct a novel superpixels-based neighborhood polarimetric covariance matrix [SN] in this paper. Specifically, the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) is first used to obtain superpixels. Then, the vector vmeancorresponding to the mean value of superpixel is further computed so as to characterize the neighborhood information of each pixel in superpixel. Finally, by combining the original scattering vector v and vmeantogether, the vector t12is built to calculate [SN]. The experiment tested on one L-Band ALOS PolSAR imagery shows that i) the polarimetric whitening filter derived from [SN] (i.e., PWFSN) has a better detection performance than that derived from [N] (i.e., PWFN); ii) the calculation process of [SN] takes much less time than that of [N].

The detection of small ships in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images is still a topic for further investigation. Recently, patch detection techniques, such as superpixel-level detection, have stimulated wide interest because they can use the information contained in similarities among neighboring pixels. In this article, we propose a novel neighborhood polarimetric covariance matrix (NPCM) to detect the small ships in PolSAR images, leading to a significant improvement in the separability between ship targets and sea clutter. The NPCM utilizes the spatial correlation between neighborhood pixels and maps the representation for a given pixel into a high-dimensional covariance matrix by embedding spatial and polarization information. Using the NPCM formalism, we apply a standard whitening filter, similar to the polarimetric whitening filter (PWF). We show how the inclusion of neighborhood information improves the performance compared with the traditional polarimetric covariance matrix. However, this is at the expense of a higher computation cost. The theory is validated via the simulated and measured data under different sea states and using different radar platforms.

Constant false alarm rate (CFAR) algorithms using a local training window are widely used for ship detection with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. However, when the density of the targets is high, such as in busy shipping lines and crowded harbors, the background statistics may be contaminated by the presence of nearby targets in the training window. Recently, a robust CFAR detector based on truncated statistics (TS) was proposed. However, the truncation of data in the format of polarimetric covariance matrices is much more complicated with respect to the truncation of intensity (single polarization) data. In this article, a polarimetric whitening filter TS CFAR (PWF-TS-CFAR) is proposed to estimate the background parameters accurately in the contaminated sea clutter for PolSAR imagery. The CFAR detector uses a polarimetric whitening filter (PWF) to turn the multidimensional problem to a 1-D case. It uses truncation to exclude possible statistically interfering outliers and uses TS to model the remaining background samples. The algorithm does not require prior knowledge of the interfering targets, and it is performed iteratively and adaptively to derive better estimates of the polarimetric covariance matrix (although this is computationally expensive). The PWF-TS-CFAR detector provides accurate background clutter modeling, a stable false alarm property, and improves the detection performance in high-target-density situations. RadarSat2 data are used to verify our derivations, and the results are in line with the theory.

Polarimetric whitening filter (PWF) can be used to filter polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images to improve the contrast between ships and sea clutter background. For this reason, the output of the filter can be used to detect ships. This paper deals with the setting of the threshold over PolSAR images filtered by the PWF. Two parameter-constant false alarm rate (2P-CFAR) is a common detection method used on whitened polarimetric images. It assumes that the probability density function (PDF) of the filtered image intensity is characterized by a log-normal distribution. However, this assumption does not always hold. In this paper, we propose a systemic analytical framework for CFAR algorithms based on PWF or multi-look PWF (MPWF). The framework covers the entire log-cumulants space in terms of the textural distributions in the product model, including the constant, gamma, inverse gamma, Fisher, beta, inverse beta, and generalized gamma distributions ($\text{G}\Gamma $Ds). We derive the analytical forms of the PDF for each of the textural distributions and the probability of false alarm (PFA). Finally, the threshold is derived by fixing the false alarm rate (FAR). Experimental results using both the simulated and real data demonstrate that the derived expressions and CFAR algorithms are valid and robust.

Ship detection is one important task in radar remote sensing. Moreover, Polarimetry shows a valuable contribution to discriminate between targets and clutter. The performance of most polarimetric detectors depends on two important factors: target clutter ratio (TCR) and speckles (or standard deviation to mean ratio of clutter background). The polarimetric matched filter (PMF) is just to maximize the TCR, while the polarimetric whitening filter (PWF) only takes the speckle reduction into consideration. In this paper, the optimal polarimetric detection filter (OPDF) is put forward, which considers maximizing the ratio of TCR to speckle. The approximate expression of the probability density function (PDF) of the OPDF is derived in closed form, so are the probability of false alarm (PFA) and the probability of detection (PD) in Wishart distribution assumption. The threshold of the OPDF detection can be easily obtained in closed form or via the bisection method. Experiments via simulated data validate the correctness of our results. The OPDF detector gives the best performance in most environments, especially in low PFA case and in the case where the statistics of targets is not the ideal Wishart distribution.