The estimation of ship velocity from SAR imagery

The estimation of ship heading and speed from a high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image of a ship and its wake is important for monitoring and tracking ships from satellites. Though the ship can often be imaged clearly, its orientation may be difficult to estimate from its image because of the effect of ship motion. The wake can provide direct information about the ship heading; the cross-range separation between the location of the ship in the image and the wake provides an estimate of the speed. The performance of algorithms on ship and wake extractions from Radarsat and other satellite imagery is discussed.