Ship Detection

EO Capability Benefits

Earth Observation (EO) is used to detect non-cooperative vessels such as those engaged in illegal fishing, smuggling or piracy, by identifying ships without Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals. It also supports border control and anti-trafficking operations by monitoring irregular migration routes. Discrepancies between reported positions and EO-based ones can also be used for further investigation, for instance, when vessels may be involved in oil spills or tank flushing. EO data also helps monitor port infrastructure and docked ships to identify suspicious activities or unauthorised access.

EO Capability Description

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is favoured for open seas detection due to its all-weather, day/night capabilities and favourable radar reflections from metallic vessels. Commercial Very High Resolution (VHR) SAR imagery can be used to detect vessels as small as 4m, while Medium (MR) or High Resolution (HR) SAR imagery can be used to detect larger ships (>50m). Optical VHR sensors depend on daylight and clear skies but can detect 5-10m ships and differentiate vessel types, while HR optical sensors like Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 have been used to detect ships larger than 30m. Both SAR and optical data can also be combined, whereby SAR detects the vessels and optical data validates the vessel type.

A main challenge is to perform object detection on a significant volume of large satellite images covering several hundreds of square kilometers while deriving results under near real time constraints. To overcome this challenge, approaches have, for instance, combined AIS data with a convolutional neural network trained on very large datasets of both annotated Very High Resolution and High Resolution optical satellite imagery. The former are commercial, the latter are free and open.

Indicative Cost

3.00 €/km²

Although services identifying ships larger than 26 m in user-provided VHR imagery (i.e. image acquisition costs are not included) are available from around 3.00 EUR/km², 24/7 monitoring, (semi-) automated image acquisition and detection and fast delivery times are often required. Show more

Relevant EO Technologies

SAR

HR OPTICAL

VHR OPTICAL

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sends out microwave pulses and coherently combines their echoes along the satellite’s flight path to “synthetically” create a very long “virtual antenna”, generating sharp images–independent of daylight and largely independent of clouds–even though microwave radar uses much longer wavelengths than visible light. Changes in backscatter amplitude (i.e. the strength of the returned signal) reflect variations in surface roughness, geometry, moisture and dielectric properties (and, over land, vegetation structure). When complex images from two (or more) acquisitions are interferometrically compared (e.g. with InSAR), differences in phase—after accounting for topography and atmospheric effects—reveal surface deformation or ground displacement along the radar line of sight.

EXAMPLES

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