Satellite maritime surveillance is an essential tool for monitoring both environmental and anthropologic marine activities. It is also a key source of information for increasing our knowledge and awareness of our offshore and coastal water. The use of satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data offers us the opportunity to detect, observe and monitor vessel locations and movement, often in remote and inaccessible areas. This may be utilised for a wide range of applications e.g. Monitoring of busy marine shipping lanes, fisheries management, search and rescue and detection of vessels engaged in illegal activity.
In SAR imagery vessels typically appear as bright pixels against a dark background. This is due to the vessel reflecting the radar rays intensely as opposed to the surrounding water. However, SAR images typically contain a high amount of speckle and noise. Pre-processing steps are applied to the raw SAR data in order to reduce the speckle effect and provide a higher contrast between vessels and the sea surface and thus reduce the occurrence of false alarm detections. The Co-ReSyF vessel detection application builds upon tools available in the SNAP toolbox. Co-ReSyF allows you search, select and process large amounts of SAR data in one place. This greatly reduces the computing and storage needs of traditional methods.
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