Non-Linear Modeling of Detectability of Ship Wake Components in Dependency to Influencing Parameters Using Spaceborne X-Band SAR

The detection of the wakes of moving ships in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery requires the presence of wake signatures, which are sufficiently distinctive from the ocean background. Various wake components exist, which constitute the SAR signatures of ship wakes. For successful wake detection, the contrast between the detectable wake components and the background is crucial. The detectability of those wake components is affected by a number of parameters, which represent the image acquisition settings, environmental conditions or ship properties including voyage information. In this study the dependency of the detectability of individual wake components to these parameters is characterized. For each wake component a detectability model is built, which takes the influence of incidence angle, polarization, wind speed, wind direction, sea state (significant wave height, wavelength, wave direction), vessel’s velocity, vessel’s course over ground and vessel’s length into account. The presented detectability models are based on regression or classification using Support Vector Machines and a dataset of manually labelled TerraSAR‑X wake samples. The considered wake components are: near‑hull turbulences, turbulent wakes, Kelvin wake arms, Kelvin wake’s transverse waves, Kelvin wake’s divergent waves, V‑narrow wakes and ship‑generated internal waves. The statements derived about wake component detectability are mainly in good agreement with statements from previous research, but also some new assumptions are provided. The most expressive influencing parameter is the movement velocity of the vessels, as all wake components are more detectable the faster vessels move.