Abstract
The free, full and open data policy of the EU’s Copernicus programme has vastly increased the amount of remotely sensed data available to both operational and research activities. However, this huge amount of data calls for new ways of accessing and processing such “big data”. This paper focuses on the use of Copernicus’s Sentinel-1 radar satellite for maritime surveillance. It presents a study in which ship positions have been automatically extracted from more than 11,500 Sentinel-1A images collected over the Mediterranean Sea, and compared with ship position reports from the Automatic Identification System (AIS). These images account for almost all the Sentinel-1A acquisitions taken over the area during the two-year period from the start of the operational phase in October 2014 until September 2016. A number of tools and platforms developed at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) that have been used in the study are described in the paper. They are: (1) Search for Unidentified Maritime Objects (SUMO), a tool for ship detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images; (2) the JRC Earth Observation Data and Processing Platform (JEODPP), a platform for efficient storage and processing of large amounts of satellite images; and (3) Blue Hub, a maritime surveillance GIS and data fusion platform. The paper presents the methodology and results of the study, giving insights into the new maritime surveillance knowledge that can be gained by analysing such a large dataset, and the lessons learnt in terms of handling and processing the big dataset.
Highlights
Maritime surveillance can be defined as the monitoring of human activities at sea
The paper presents the methodology and results of the study, giving insights into the new maritime surveillance knowledge that can be gained by analysing such a large dataset, and the lessons learnt in terms of handling and processing the big dataset
The main Search for Unidentified Maritime Objects (SUMO) processing has been conducted on 11,647 Sentinel-1A products that constitute on 11,647 constitute a data volume of around
Summary
Maritime surveillance can be defined as the monitoring of human activities at sea. The surveillance is intended to support efforts related with security (e.g., irregular sea border crossing, and smuggling of illegal goods or substances), safety (e.g., Search and Rescue, and shipping traffic), and environmental and sustainability (e.g., fishing control, and pollution) aspects. This paper focuses on shipping activities, some views on non-shipping activities (e.g., fixed oil and gas platforms, aquaculture equipment, or offshore wind farms) are gained as a by-product. Shipping monitoring systems can broadly be classified in two groups: cooperative and non-cooperative. Cooperative systems rely on the ships reporting information about themselves (e.g., identification, position, and speed).
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