A method has been developed to reduce large two-dimensional images to significantly smaller feature lists. These feature lists overcome the problem of storing and manipulating large amounts of data. A new artificial neural network using conjugate gradient training methods, operating on sets of feature lists, was successfully trained to determine the presence or absence of wakes in synthetic aperture radar images. A comparison has been made between the different conjugate gradient and steepest-descent training methods and has demonstrated the superiority of the former over the latter. >