On the use of the stochastic matched filter for ship wake detection in SAR images

Detecting straight patterns like ship wakes on a SAR image is not easy because there is no
a priori
information on orientation and position, moreover, SAR images are speckle noised. This article describes a ship wake detection technique based on the discrete Radon transform and stochastic matched filtering (SMF) used in detection. The association of these two processing methods leads to a detection algorithm that only requires the knowledge of the second order statistics of the signal and the noise. Experimentation on real SAR images shows the efficiency of the technique