The traditional ship detection algorithms

such as 2L-IHP (Two Looks Internal Hermitian Product)

Pol-IHP (Polarimetric Internal Hermitian Product)

etc

usually utilized two sub-look images cross-correlation to decrease omitted detection for small ships.However

because they were constrained by the number of sub-look images

the previous methods could not increase ship-sea contrast to much extent

which affected the ship detection accuracy.Therefore

this paper proposes a detection algorithm based on generalized multi-sublooks correlation using polarimetric SAR (POLSAR) data.Firstly

the sub-look decomposition method is applied for POLSAR data to get multi-sublook POLSAR images.Then the correlation matrix and the coherence operator based on the generalized similarity parameter (GSP) are defined to calculate the coherence image of the multi-sublook images.Finally

the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection method is utilized for ship detection by the calculated cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the coherence image.The experiments prove that ship-sea contrast can be increased with the number of sublook images by the propose method

which reduces the undetected probability of the ships and also improve the ship detection accuracy significantly.