Information about ship movement on water surface is one of the important detected objects in many fields such as water carriage engineering and military. In this paper

two indirect methods for the estimation of a moving ship’s speed by using remote sensing techniques are discussed because there is a close relation between static characteristics of ship wake and ship speed. To extract ship speed

one method is about using wave height spectra information of ship wake

and other method about using transverse wave information of ship wake. After the theory of these two methods is introduced

a scheme about extraction of a ship’s speed by using remote sensing techniques is described and these two methods are validated by using simulated and observed ship wake wave height data. It can be seen from the calculated results that both the two methods meet the requirement of people who need to know only magnitude of ship speed and error of the method on using wave height spectra to extract ship speed. The study shows a new method to real-timely or nearly real-timely detect the speed of a moving ship and has good perspective on its applications in the fields of enhancing ship management ability

military monitoring ability

and attacking military objects ability.