The speed and beam of a ship from its wake's SAR images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of ships and their wakes frequently exhibit long dark and bright streaks. Some of them can be attributed to the Kelvin wavewake and others to the turbulent and bright narrow V-wake. The wakes contain information about the ship. The present work deals with estimates of the ship beam and its velocity by processing SAR images of the Kelvin and turbulent wakes. It is assumed that the ship moves along a straight path with constant speed. For the detection of the linear features of the ship wake, the fast discrete Radon transform is employed. Once the turbulent wake is detected, the ship beam is estimated by a novel method that exploits the expansion of the turbulent wake aft a ship. A semiempirical relation between the ship beam and the width of its turbulent wake is derived and analyzed. An algorithm for estimating the width of the turbulent wake in SAR images and the ship beam is developed. The spectrum of ship-generated waves along the Kelvin cusp-lines is discussed. Processing of the lines, pertaining to the Kelvin wake bounds, and analysis of the spectral peaks enables to estimate the ship speed. Numerical examples of processing of airborne SAR images are provided.