In polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR), it is of great significance for civil and military applications to find novel model-based decomposition methods suitable for ship detection in different detection backgrounds. Based on the physical interpretation of polarimetric decomposition theory and the Lasso rule for sparse features, we propose a four-component decomposition model, which is composed of surface scattering (Odd), double-bounce scattering (Dbl), volume scattering (Vol), and ±45° oriented dipole (Od). In principle, the Od component can describe the compounded scattering structure of a ship consisting of odd-bounce and even-bounce reflectors. Moreover, the pocket perceptron learning algorithm (PPLA) and support vector machine (SVM) are utilized to solve the linear inseparable problems in this study. Using large amounts of RADARSAT-2 (RS-2) fully polarized SAR data and AIRSAR data, our experimental results show that the Od component can make a great contribution to ship detection. Compared with other conventional decomposition methods used in the experiments, the proposed four-component decomposition method has better performance and is more effective and feasible to detect ships.

With the expanding application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in ocean monitoring and port regulation, nearshore ship detection based on SAR image faces notable challenges arising from strong background scattering, dense target occlusion, and large pose variations. Therefore, this paper proposes a two-stage oriented detection network named EARS-Net to improve the accuracy of ship detection in complex nearshore environments. Specifically, a lightweight convolutional block attention module (CBAM) is embedded into the high-level semantic stages of ResNet50 to enhance discriminative ship features while suppressing interference from port infrastructures and shoreline structures. Then, the dynamic angle regression loss (DAL) is proposed, and the angle weight function is designed according to the ship direction distribution characteristics, which allocates higher regression weight to the ship target with larger tilt angle, improving the defect of insufficient positioning accuracy for large angle ships. Moreover, a training strategy that combines focal loss, multi-scale training, and rotated online hard example mining (ROHEM) is employed to alleviate sample imbalance and improve generalization in dense scenes. Experimental results on the nearshore subset of the SSDD show that EARS-Net achieves an average precision (AP) of 0.903 on the test set, demonstrating reliable detection capability under complex backgrounds and dense target distributions. These results validate the effectiveness of our method and highlight its potential as a practical engineering solution for enhancing port situational awareness and coastal security monitoring.