Real-time radar detection of iceberg shadows

The Hough transform is used to estimate the radial direction of shadows cast by icebergs in surface-based marine radar returns using a Warp systolic computer. Automatically locating these shadows leads directly to automatically locating the icebergs casting the shadows. This is useful for the unattended navigation of a vessel through sea ice, as well as for improving the accuracy of a classified sea-ice image. The results reported show that the Hough transform can successfully estimate the radial directions of the shadows cast by the icebergs, and that the implementation on the Warp computer is commensurate with a real-time requirement for shadow detection.