SynthWakeSAR dataset

The synthetic ship classification dataset of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of the sea surface (SynthWakeSAR) includes 10 real ship models for a total of 46080 simulated images containing visible ship wakes. The dataset was created using the “AssenSAR Image Simulator”, also available via the University of Bristol. The simulated SAR images consist of normalized radar cross-sections (NRCS) with tilt and hydrodynamic modulations and velocity bunching. The size of each scene is 0.96 × 0.96 km and the SAR resolution is 3.3 m in both azimuth and range directions. The size of the images is 227x227x1 as required by the standard convolutional neural network architecture AlexNet. The dataset is provided in three variants (i) as noise-free images NF, (ii) as noisy images (N) with simulated speckle noise, and (iii) as despeckled SAR images (D). This dataset is intended primarily for developing ship classification algorithms based on their wake signature in SAR images. This dataset is published under a GNU General Public License v3.0.