Vessel Detection and velocity estimation using SAR amplitude images

This paper presents a novel technique to detect ships and estimate their velocities. The technique takes advantage of two existing techniques and inserts some innovation by using the Radon Transform to detect the ship wake and estimate the range velocity component. For detection, cross correlation of split-look is used. To estimate the azimuth velocity component a sequence of single-look SAR images which are processed using look filters with different center frequencies are used. In these images, candidates for moving objects are detected and a displacement vector is performed for each candidate, therefore making possible the estimation of the ship velocity using amplitude SAR images.