Automated Processing System for SAR Target Detection and Identification in Near Real Time Applications For Maritime Situational Awareness.

Abstract

Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems have already proven their advantage in Maritime Situational Awareness applications, including such task as targeted vessel detection at sea. Today, involving multiple SAR missions, it is possible to reduce limitations related to the sensor’s spatial coverage as well as revisit time. Complementary information from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) offers a huge benefit; regardless that AIS original was designed for collision avoidance only. In particular, it enables to identify detected targets as well as to perform AIS anomaly investigations. This paper describes completely automated processing system of deriving SAR-AIS data fusion products developed at the Maritime Security Lab Neustrelitz, part of DLR’s German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD). Presented technology has been implemented for operational use in Near Real Time (NRT) Applications at DLR’s Ground Station in Neustrelitz. The current implementation supports following SAR satellites: TerraSAR-X/ TanDEM-X, Radarsat-2 and Sentinel 1. The development is still ongoing and supported by different projects, to increase the overall performance and to be compliant to the user requirements.