Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is used to persistently monitor marine areas in all weather conditions for excellent ship and wake identification. Current deep learning-based ship wake detection methods rely on supervised learning. However, no publicly available large-scale SAR dataset is available to support this learning method. Owing to the diversity of ship wake characteristics in SAR images and the complexities of sea states, contemporary computer vision algorithms are generally ineffective for SAR image recognition tasks. To overcome these issues, this article presents the new, well-annotatedOpenSARWakedataset dedicated to oriented ship wake detection. This collection provides 3,973 images containing two polarization modes and 4,096 instances. Their image features are used to train a novel two-stage SWNet feature refinement detector that adopts a sophisticated HR-FPN* backbone for SAR ship wake detection. The detector recognizes nearly all wake characterizations. The trained SWNet achieves state-of-the-art detection performance with 49.0% mAP, outperforming most benchmarking algorithms. TheOpenSARWakedataset is available at https://github.com/libzzluo/OpenSARWake.

Sea clutter and inherent speckle noise in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images can pose challenges to accurate sea surface target detection, especially for phenomena such as ship wakes reliant on efficient feature extraction. Traditional denoising methods require manual tradeoffs between denoising effects and detail retention. Supervised denoising methods based on deep learning demand a substantial number of real noisy-clean image pairs for training, coupled with specific parameter settings and labeled data amounts. In response to these challenges, this article introduces Wake2Wake, a self-supervised denoising method aimed at enhancing the performance of existing deep learning-based ship wake detectors. The method incorporates a novel ship wake awareness (SWA) block designated to address the distinctive features of turbulent and Kelvin wakes. Furthermore, to overcome the source imbalance problem in the dataset, simulated wake data are integrated into the training process. This not only mitigates dataset imbalances but also significantly improves both denoising and detection performance. The experimental results indicate that Wake2Wake improves the accuracy of Rotated RepPoints by 3.6 mAP and S2A-Net by 2.6 mAP on the OpenSARWake dataset, respectively. The proposed approach achieves varied extents of improvement, showcasing its potential in mitigating sea clutter and enhancing feature extraction, especially in detecting SAR ship wakes.