Abstract
The Sentinel-2 satellites in the Copernicus program provide high resolution multispectral images, which are recorded with temporal offsets up to 2.6 s. Moving aircrafts and ships are therefore observed at different positions due to the multispectral band offsets, from which velocities can be determined. We describe an algorithm for detecting aircrafts and ships, and determining their speed, heading, position, length, etc. Aircraft velocities are also affected by the parallax effect and jet streams, and we show how the altitude and the jet stream speed can be determined from the geometry of the aircraft and/or contrail heading. Ship speeds are more difficult to determine as wakes affect the average ship positions differently in the various multispectral bands, and more advanced corrections methods are shown to improve the velocity determination.
Highlights
Surveillance for marine and air space situation awareness is essential for monitoring and controlling traffic safety, piracy, smuggling, fishing, irregular migration, trespassing, spying, icebergs, shipwrecks, the environment, etc
The above results can be taken as proof of principle for our novel method utilizing the temporal offsets in the Sentinel-2 multispectral imager for determining velocities and altitudes of moving objects
The jet stream velocity cannot be determined from the S2 images but requires separate atmospheric information or alternatively, the jet stream can be estimated by requiring the aircraft to fly with standard cruise speed or altitude of commercial airliners
Summary
Surveillance for marine and air space situation awareness is essential for monitoring and controlling traffic safety, piracy, smuggling, fishing, irregular migration, trespassing, spying, icebergs, shipwrecks, the environment (oil spill or pollution), etc. The work presented here is novel when it comes to exploiting the temporal offsets in Sentinel-2 MSI, and for determining aircraft velocities and altitudes, and ship speeds. We outline the basic physics for moving objects in satellite multispectral images with temporal offsets, the parallax effects and influence of jet streams. From Sentinel-2 multispectral images with known temporal offsets we calculate the resulting speed, heading, altitudes, etc. Calculations for a large number of ships and aircrafts are required for better statistics and improving the model by fine-tuning the parameters This could lead to an annotated database useful for machine learning methods
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