Ship Wake Detection in SAR Images Based on Radon Transformation and Morphologic Image Processing

An algorithm for ship wake detection, based on Radon transformation and mathematical morphologic image processing (called as SWDRM) is developed. The important information from observation are kept in the inverted gray level image after being manipulated in Radon space. Ship detection can be achieved from a binary image. It is applied to automatic detection for ship moving from the SEASAT SAR images. The effect due to high level multiplied speckle noise is also discussed. The results show that this algorithm is well robust in noise presence, and is not very sensitive to the threshold parameters and the width of working window.