An algorithm for ship wake detection from the synthetic aperture radar images using the Radon transform and morphological image processing

Abstract

Using the Radon transform and morphological image processing, an algorithm for ship wake detection in the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is developed. Being manipulated in the Radon space to invert the grey-level and binary images, the linear texture of a ship wake in oceanic clutter can be easily detected. It is applied to automatic detection for moving ship from the SEASAT SAR image. The results show that this algorithm is very robust in a strong noisy background and is not very sensitive to the threshold parameter and the working window size.

Keywords:

• ship wake
• synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image
• Radon transform-morphological processing