Unsupervised Embedding-Based Clustering for Vehicle Detection Refinement in SAR Imagery
2026 (English)In: Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2026, p. 1114-1118Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
High-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) enables persistent monitoring under challenging illumination and weather conditions, but reliable vehicle detection remains difficult due to speckle, geometry-dependent scattering, and the scarcity of annotated SAR datasets for site- and mode-specific scenarios. This paper presents an unsupervised refinement pipeline for vehicle detection in TerraSAR-X imagery. Candidate regions are first generated within a region of interest using ordered-statistics CFAR (OS-CFAR). Each candidate is then represented by a feature embedding extracted from a frozen pretrained MobileNetV2 backbone, and embeddings collected across a short multi-temporal stack are clustered with K-means to separate vehicle-like signatures from other high-response candidates. Evaluation is supported by co-registered UAV imagery for qualitative verification. Across seven TerraSAR-X acquisitions acquired at approximately two-week intervals (including one held-out acquisition reported separately for generalization), the proposed clustering stage reduces false positives relative to OS-CFAR-only candidate sets and improves end-to-end detection quality, yielding an effective F1-score of 0.736 while preserving a low-annotation operating regime.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2026. p. 1114-1118
Keywords [en]
CFAR, feature embedding, synthetic aperture radar, TerraSAR-X, unsupervised learning, Embeddings, Image segmentation, K-means clustering, Radar imaging, Remote sensing, Satellites, Tracking radar, Vehicle detection, Based clustering, Condition, High resolution synthetic aperture radar, Ordered statistics, Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery, Vehicles detection
National Category
Signal Processing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:bth-30412DOI: 10.1109/CCECE68150.2026.11609989Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105046144654ISBN: 9798331588403 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:bth-30412DiVA, id: diva2:2093854
Conference
39th IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, CCECE 2026, Montreal, May 18-20, 2026
2026-08-202026-08-202026-08-21Bibliographically approved