An algorithm for ship wake detection from the SAR image using the Radon transform and morphological image processing

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