scholarly journals Classification-Aided SAR and AIS Data Fusion for Space-Based Maritime Surveillance

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Maximilian Rodger ◽  
Raffaella Guida

A wide range of research activities exploit spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Automatic Identification System (AIS) for applications that contribute to maritime safety and security. An important requirement of SAR and AIS data fusion is accurate data association (or correlation), which is the process of linking SAR ship detections and AIS observations considered to be of a common origin. The data association is particularly difficult in dense shipping environments, where ships detected in SAR imagery can be wrongly associated with AIS observations. This often results in an erroneous and/or inaccurate maritime picture. Therefore, a classification-aided data association technique is proposed which uses a transfer learning method to classify ship types in SAR imagery. Specifically, a ship classification model is first trained on AIS data and then transferred to make predictions on SAR ship detections. These predictions are subsequently used in the data association which uses a rank-ordered assignment technique to provide a robust match between the data. Two case studies in the UK are used to evaluate the performance of the classification-aided data association technique based on the types of SAR product used for maritime surveillance: wide-area and large-scale data association in the English Channel and focused data association in the Solent. Results show a high level of correspondence between the data that is robust to dense shipping or high traffic, and the confidence in the data association is improved when using class (i.e., ship type) information.

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2756
Author(s):  
Alessandro Galdelli ◽  
Adriano Mancini ◽  
Carmen Ferrà ◽  
Anna Nora Tassetti

Maritime traffic and fishing activities have accelerated considerably over the last decade, with a consequent impact on the environment and marine resources. Meanwhile, a growing number of ship-reporting technologies and remote-sensing systems are generating an overwhelming amount of spatio-temporal and geographically distributed data related to large-scale vessels and their movements. Individual technologies have distinct limitations but, when combined, can provide a better view of what is happening at sea, lead to effectively monitor fishing activities, and help tackle the investigations of suspicious behaviors in close proximity of managed areas. The paper integrates non-cooperative Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Sentinel-1 images and cooperative Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, by proposing two types of associations: (i) point-to-point and (ii) point-to-line. They allow the fusion of ship positions and highlight “suspicious” AIS data gaps in close proximity of managed areas that can be further investigated only once the vessel—and the gear it adopts—is known. This is addressed by a machine-learning approach based on the Fast Fourier Transform that classifies single sea trips. The approach is tested on a case study in the central Adriatic Sea, automatically reporting AIS-SAR associations and seeking ships that are not broadcasting their positions (intentionally or not). Results allow the discrimination of collaborative and non-collaborative ships, playing a key role in detecting potential suspect behaviors especially in close proximity of managed areas.


Computers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
Ahmad O. Aseeri

Deep Learning-based methods have emerged to be one of the most effective and practical solutions in a wide range of medical problems, including the diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias. A critical step to a precocious diagnosis in many heart dysfunctions diseases starts with the accurate detection and classification of cardiac arrhythmias, which can be achieved via electrocardiograms (ECGs). Motivated by the desire to enhance conventional clinical methods in diagnosing cardiac arrhythmias, we introduce an uncertainty-aware deep learning-based predictive model design for accurate large-scale classification of cardiac arrhythmias successfully trained and evaluated using three benchmark medical datasets. In addition, considering that the quantification of uncertainty estimates is vital for clinical decision-making, our method incorporates a probabilistic approach to capture the model’s uncertainty using a Bayesian-based approximation method without introducing additional parameters or significant changes to the network’s architecture. Although many arrhythmias classification solutions with various ECG feature engineering techniques have been reported in the literature, the introduced AI-based probabilistic-enabled method in this paper outperforms the results of existing methods in outstanding multiclass classification results that manifest F1 scores of 98.62% and 96.73% with (MIT-BIH) dataset of 20 annotations, and 99.23% and 96.94% with (INCART) dataset of eight annotations, and 97.25% and 96.73% with (BIDMC) dataset of six annotations, for the deep ensemble and probabilistic mode, respectively. We demonstrate our method’s high-performing and statistical reliability results in numerical experiments on the language modeling using the gating mechanism of Recurrent Neural Networks.


Author(s):  
Markku Simila ◽  
Mikko Lensu

Ship speeds extracted from AIS data vary with ice conditions. We extrapolated this variation with SAR data to a chart of expected icegoing speed. The study is for the Gulf of Bothnia in March 2013 and for ships with ice class 1A Super that are able to navigate without icbreaker assistance. The speed was normalized to 0-10 for each ship. As the matching between AIS and SAR was complicated by ice drift during the time gap, from hours to two days, we calculated a set of local SAR statistics over several scales. We used random tree regression to estimate the speed. The accuracy was quantified by mean squared error (MSE), and the fraction of estimates close to the actual speeds. These depended strongly on the route and the day. MSE varied from 0.4 to 2.7 units2 for daily routes. 65 % of the estimates deviated less than one unit and 82 % less than 1.5 units from the AIS speeds. The estimated daily mean speeds were close to the observations. Largest speed decreases were provided by the estimator in a dampened form or not at all. This improved when ice chart thickness was included as one predictor.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jona Raphael ◽  
Ben Eggleston ◽  
Ryan Covington ◽  
Tatianna Evanisko ◽  
Sasha Bylsma ◽  
...  

<p><strong>Operational oil discharges from ships</strong>, also known as “bilge dumping,” have been identified as a major source of petroleum products entering our oceans, cumulatively exceeding the largest oil spills, such as the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon spills, even when considered over short time spans. However, we still don’t have a good estimate of</p><ul><li>How much oil is being discharged;</li> <li>Where the discharge is happening;</li> <li>Who the responsible vessels are.</li> </ul><p>This makes it difficult to prevent and effectively respond to oil pollution that can damage our marine and coastal environments and economies that depend on them.</p><p> </p><p>In this presentation we will share SkyTruth’s recent work to address these gaps using machine learning tools to detect oil pollution events and identify the responsible vessels when possible. We use a convolutional neural network (CNN) in a ResNet-34 architecture to perform <strong>pixel segmentation</strong> on all incoming <strong>Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar</strong> (SAR) imagery to classify slicks. Despite the satellites’ incomplete oceanic coverage, we have been detecting an average of <strong>135 vessel slicks per month</strong>, and have identified several geographic hotspots where oily discharges are occurring regularly. For the images that capture a vessel in the act of discharging oil, we rely on an <strong>Automatic Identification System</strong> (AIS) database to extract details about the ships, including vessel type and flag state. We will share our experience</p><ul><li>Making sufficient training data from inherently sparse satellite image datasets;</li> <li>Building a computer vision model using PyTorch and fastai;</li> <li>Fully automating the process in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.</li> </ul><p>The application has been running continuously since August 2020, has processed over 380,000 Sentinel-1 images, and has populated a database with more than 1100 high-confidence slicks from vessels. We will be discussing <strong>preliminary results</strong> from this dataset and remaining challenges to be overcome.</p><p> </p><p>Our objective in making this information and the underlying code, models, and training data <strong>freely available to the public</strong> and governments around the world is to enable public pressure campaigns to improve the prevention of and response to pollution events. Learn more at https://skytruth.org/bilge-dumping/</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 397-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ondrej Stopka ◽  
Mária Stopková ◽  
Vladimír Ľupták

AbstractThe effect of logistics has increased steadily in recent years. In regard to the concept of logistics, it is not only referred to as transportation of goods from place A to place B, as many people believe. Logistics covers a wide range of enterprise (supply chain) processes. It is a whole value-creation chain including not only material flows, but also energy, human resources and valuable information. The objective of this research study is to find issues and risks in the current state of supply, inventory management and warehousing process in the given enterprise. In the study, proposals to streamline the current state in terms of inventory management identification system in particular manufacturing enterprise, which is the primary purpose of the submitted paper, are outlined. The specific result is to develop the proposal to increase efficiency and reduce risk regarding the current situation of inventory management identification system applying suitable techniques of the multi-criteria analysis, in particular by the TOPSIS method and by the WSA method.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 1078 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramona Pelich ◽  
Marco Chini ◽  
Renaud Hostache ◽  
Patrick Matgen ◽  
Carlos Lopez-Martinez ◽  
...  

This research addresses the use of dual-polarimetric descriptors for automatic large-scale ship detection and characterization from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. Ship detection is usually performed independently on each polarization channel and the detection results are merged subsequently. In this study, we propose to make use of the complex coherence between the two polarization channels of Sentinel-1 and to perform vessel detection in this domain. Therefore, an automatic algorithm, based on the dual-polarization coherence, and applicable to entire large scale SAR scenes in a timely manner, is developed. Automatic identification system (AIS) data are used for an extensive and also large scale cross-comparison with the SAR-based detections. The comparative assessment allows us to evaluate the added-value of the dual-polarization complex coherence, with respect to SAR intensity images in ship detection, as well as the SAR detection performances depending on a vessel’s size. The proposed methodology is justified statistically and tested on Sentinel-1 data acquired over two different and contrasting, in terms of traffic conditions, areas: the English Channel the and Pacific coastline of Mexico. The results indicate a very high SAR detection rate, i.e., >80%, for vessels larger than 60 m and a decrease of detection rate up to 40 % for smaller size vessels. In addition, the analysis highlights many SAR detections without corresponding AIS positions, indicating the complementarity of SAR with respect to cooperative sources for detecting dark vessels.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 153-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimov Stojce Ilcev

Abstract This paper presents the main technical characteristics and working performances of coastal maritime surveillance radars, such as low-power High-Frequency Surface Wave Radars (HFSWR) and Over the Horizon Radars (OTHR). These radars have demonstrated to be a cost-effective long-range early-warning sensor for ship detection and tracking in coastal waters, sea channels and passages. In this work, multi-target tracking and data fusion techniques are applied to live-recorded data from a network of oceanographic HFSWR stations installed in Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN), Wellen Radar (WERA) in Ligurian Sea (Mediterranean Sea), CODAR Ocean Sebsorsin and in the German Bight (North Sea). The coastal Imaging Sciences Research (ISR) HFSWR system, Multi-static ISR HF Radar, Ship Classification using Multi-Frequency HF Radar, Coastal HF radar surveillance of pirate boats and Different projects of coastal HF radars for vessels detecting are described. Ship reports from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), recorded from both coastal and satellite Land Earth Stations (LES) are exploited as ground truth information and a methodology is applied to classify the fused tracks and to estimate system performances. Experimental results for all above solutions are presented and discussed, together with an outline for future integration and infrastructures.


Author(s):  
Björn Tings ◽  
Sven Jacobsen ◽  
Stefan Wiehle ◽  
Egbert Schwarz ◽  
Holger Daedelow

Recent studies investigated the detectability of ship wake signatures on SAR imagery using a large number of SAR images collocated with Automatic Identification System data for training machine learning models. These detectability models are in agreement with oceanographic expectations from preceding studies and can therefore be used for comparing the performance of different SAR sensors in terms of wake detectability. Previous model comparisons showed better wake detection performance of TerraSAR-X (TS-X) than of RADARSAT-2 (RS2) and Sentinel-1 (S1). A comparison between CosmoSkymed (CSK) and RS2 is performed here, to examine the hypothesis that X-Band is generally better for wake detection than C-Band. Finally, this hypothesis is not confirmed, as the detectability models for TS-X, CSK and RS2 reveal similar performances. A comparison of wake detection performance should take the individual wake components into account separately.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 1132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markku Similä ◽  
Mikko Lensu

The automatic identification system (AIS) was developed to support the safety of marine traffic. In ice-covered seas, the ship speeds extracted from AIS data vary with ice conditions that are simultaneously reflected by features in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In this study, the speed variation was related to the SAR features and the results were applied to generate a chart of expected speeds from the SAR image. The study was done in the Gulf of Bothnia in March 2013 for ships with ice class IA Super that are able to navigate without icebreaker assistance. The speeds were normalized to dimensionless units ranging from 0 to 10 for each ship. As the matching between AIS and SAR was complicated by ice drift during the time gap (from hours to two days), we calculated a set of local statistical SAR features over several scales. Random forest tree regression was used to estimate the speed. The accuracy was quantified by mean squared error and by the fraction of estimates close to the actual speeds. These depended strongly on the route and the day. The error varied from 0.4 to 2.7 units2 for daily routes. Sixty-five percent of the estimates deviated by less than one speed unit and 82% by less than 1.5 speed units from the AIS speeds. The estimated daily mean speeds were close to the observations. The largest speed decreases were provided by the estimator in a dampened form or not at all. This improved when the ice chart thickness was included as a predictor.


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