Study on detection of man-made phenomena appearing on the sea surface in SAR images: detection of ship wakes using hough transformation

摘要

Detection of man-made phenomena appearing on the sea surface, such as ship wakes and oil spills, is a very important issue in Radar systems. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is most suitable tool for such applications, because the radar backscatter is fully dependent on the surface conditions of the target object, so it can distinguish between the surfaces of natural seawater and man-made phenomena. In the meantime SAR images include large amount of noise, especially the distinctive seaclutter from the sea surface, in comparison with optical images. This paper introduces some studies adopting different kinds of processing algorithm to optimize the detection of man-made phenomena from noisy SAR images, then proposes Hough transformation based on a normalized hough plane to detect ship wakes.