A Novel Ship Wake Detection Algorithm Based on WTHT and Radon Transform

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel ship wake detection algorithm based on the White Top-hat Transform (WTHT) and the Radon transform, which aims to improve the contrast between the ship wake and the background so as to improve the detection performance on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The proposed algorithm includes two major processes, and one is to improve the contrast and another one is to locate the ship wake. In high sea state conditions, the contrast of ship wake and background can be very low, which makes it difficult to detect. In the first step, the proposed contrast improvement algorithm is applied to improving the contrast which helps for improving the detection performance. An attribute filter based on edge detection result is adopted here. In the second step the contrast improved image is transformed into the Radon domain followed by peak extraction process to find the wake, the WTHT is used once more in this step. Finally, in the last step, the wake is overlapped on the original image. Experimental results on Tiangong-2 Interferometric Imaging Radar Altimeter (InIRA) images are presented and compared with that obtained by using the classical algorithm, and in this way, the better performance of our algorithm is demonstrated.