Abstract: A ship multi-wake detection method based on recursive modified Hough transform field is proposed for ship wakes with different imaging characteristic in SAR imagery.This method is to detect the obvious wake using the biggest peak value in Hough transform field firstly.Secondly,the biggest peak value is got rid of from the Hough transform field so as to give prominence to the hypo-peak value for the second wake.So recursively modifying the multi-peak structure of Hough transform field is going on till all wakes that their peak values in modified Hough transform field are higher than the threshold value are detected.And the detection for multi-wakes with different contrast and width is implemented.The experiment of multi-wake detection in the SAR imagery shows that the method proposed is effective for detecting multi-wakes with different imaging characteristic.