Localized Radon transform-based detection of ship wakes in SAR images

Presents a Radon transform-based approach to the detection of ship wakes in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The key element of this technique is a localization of the Radon transform, whereby the intensity integration is performed over short line segments rather than across the entire image. A linear feature detection algorithm, which utilizes this localized Radon transform, is then developed. In this algorithm, referred to as the feature space line detector algorithm, the transform space is subjected to processing which serves to isolate and locate the response of linear features and suppresses the response of false alarms. This algorithm is tested on both synthetic images corrupted by various levels of Weibull multiplicative noise and on actual SAR images of ship wakes. The results of this testing demonstrate the algorithm's robustness in the presence of noise, as well as its ability to detect and localize linear features that are significantly shorter than the image dimensions. >