A novel ship wake detection method based on white top-hat transformation

This paper proposes a method to improve the contrast between ship wake and background in radar image so as to better detect the ship wake. The method is based on the white top-hat transformation with the structuring element determined by the edge orientation. By applying the white top-hat transformation on each submatrix, the contrast can be improved, which is good for detecting the location of wake in the Radon domain. The radar image containing ship wake from the TG-2 interferometric imaging radar altimeter (InIRA) is processed to test the method, and the results validate the algorithm very well.