Ship wake region detection by using multi-feature recombination and area-based morphological analysis in ATI-SAR systems

For moving ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, ship wakes on the sea surface may be detectable, thus leading to interferences in reconnaissance. To address this issue, a wake region detection approach by using multi-feature recombination and area-based morphological analysis is proposed with along-track interferogram-SAR systems. This approach aims to detect the near-ship wake region that is nearby a ship's hull and between two kelvin cusp lines. A novel test is constructed by recombining magnitude, phase, and the local variance of phase in the complex multi-look interferometric SAR image to detect the potential pixels of the ship wakes. Then, with a clustering algorithm based on the proposed test and the pixel spatial distance, the potential wake regions are acquired, and the real ones having sufficiently large areas can be accurately determined. Finally, experimental results on the TerraSAR-X dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.