Analysis of Sea Waves and Ship Wake Detection

Observing and modelling the shape of the sea's surface has been of great importance to the researchers seeking to understand the sea waves with the aim of benefitting the safe undertaking of various maritime activities. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images carry a lot of such information and characteristic patterns which can be exploited to understand sea surface currents and ship behaviours. Through this work, we have studied sea wave patterns and the formation of ship wakes. To retrieve the direction of sea currents from these radar images, algorithms based on 2D Fast Fourier Transform (Fast Fourier Transform) has been employed.SAR images can be taken into consideration for ship route estimation as well by studying the behaviour of ship wakes and ship movement. Ship wakes have a pivotal role in the analysis of SAR images of a sea due to the volume of information which can be extracted through them. In this work, we have explored Hough Transform as a line detection method in which linear features are enhanced. Several Hough transform techniques are implemented on these images to obtain and demarcate visible linear features formed by the ship wakes. Each image point is mapped to detect parameterized shapes, hence, it reduces the possibility of detecting spatially spread patterns in the image. For the detection procedure ships containing tiles from the original images are tiled out. The proposed work has been experimented on Setinel-1B SAR images with multiple ships present in them. The results obtained show a fairly accurate detection performance. This study has been conducted on reliable radar data and several features of the sea waves and surface have been explored.