An improvement of ship wake detection based on the radon transform

The purpose of this article is to present a new process for ship wake detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Most of detection algorithms uses the Radon transform. In fact, due to its properties, this approach is particularly suited for such a detection. The main originality of our work is the wedding between the Radon transform and a filtering method used here to interpolate the image in a rotating reference system, introduced by the Radon transform. This filtering method is the stochastic matched filtering technique, which allows to maximize the signal to noise ratio after process. Because of the amount of calculus this method implies, we used a new formulation based on the signal expansion into discrete cosine transform. Experimental results on SIR-C/X-SAR and ERS SAR images are presented and compared to those obtained using some classical approaches. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.