Abstract
The synergic utilization of data from different sources, either ground-based or spaceborne, can lead to effective monitoring of maritime activities. To this end, the integration of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images with data reported by the automatic identification system (AIS) is of high interest. Accurate matching of ships detected in SAR images with AIS data requires compensation of the azimuth offset, which depends on the ship’s velocity. The existing procedures interpolate the route information gathered by AIS to estimate the ship’s velocity at the epoch of the SAR data, to remove the offset. Matching accuracy is limited by interpolation errors and AIS route information unavailability or uncertainties. This paper proposes the use of SAR-based ship velocity estimations to improve the integration of AIS and SAR data. A case study has been analyzed, in which the method has been tested on TerraSAR-X images collected over the Gulf of Naples, Italy. Presented results show that the matching is improved with respect to standard procedures. The proposed method limits the distance between the AIS report and the SAR-based detection to less than 150 m, which is in line with maritime surveillance needs.
Highlights
Monitoring human activities at sea and improving the Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) are topics of major and increasing interest [1,2,3,4,5]
This paper proposes the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-based ship velocity estimations to improve the integration of automatic identification system (AIS) and SAR data
Several AIS-SAR data matching methods have been developed in recent years and the ship velocity and heading values included in the AIS data are typically exploited
Summary
Monitoring human activities at sea and improving the Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) are topics of major and increasing interest [1,2,3,4,5]. Plenty of experimental results exist concerning the use of the AIS data to validate and/to estimate performance of SAR-based detection algorithms [17]. This means that the false and missed alarm rates are estimated based on the number of ships detected by SAR which are confirmed by AIS. In this contest, AIS is used as a source of reference or ground truth data. An innovative method for improving the AIS-SAR matching is proposed in the following It foresees the estimation of ship velocity by suitable SAR-based techniques.
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