Automatic ship detection from SAR images

Ship detection involves two correlated tasks — ship target detection and ship wake detection. This paper proposes a method for automatic ship wake detection from SAR image. A localized Radon transform is processed around the ship target to detect linear features after ship target detection. It can smooth the speckle noise and improve the SNR in Radon transform space. So the false alarms can be reduced. If the extracted linear feature is proved to be a ship wake after testing, the wake line can be reconstructed in the original SAR image and the ship orientation can be estimated without ambiguity.