Complete processing system that uses fuzzy logic for ship detection in SAR images

The automatic interpretation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is one of the most interesting and important application fields of image processing. The authors present a complete digital signal processing chain for the automatic detection of ships in SAR images. Particular attention has been devoted to two problems: the prefiltering problem which aims to reduce the speckle noise in the image, and the robustness problem that is related to the optimisation of the true-target detection/rejection capability. The processing chain has been implemented and tested on a sequential machine and on a parallel architecture of IMS T800 transputers.