Ship wake detection in SAR images: a segmentation-based approach

This paper deals with the derivation of a fully automatic and reliable ship wake detector (SWD), which can operate in conjunction with a ship detector scheme (SD) for ship traffic control against non-homogeneous sea background in SAR images. A novel segmentation-based technique is introduced for ship wake detection, which overcomes the drawbacks suffered by standard techniques operating in non-homogeneous background. This is composed of a preliminary segmentation stage to extract context information, followed by a modified wake detector. The new SWD scheme is shown to yield a large performance improvement on both simulated and real SAR data.