Maritime Surveillance with a Compact Multichannel Radar Sensor on High-Altitude Platforms: An Overview

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the onboard maritime surveillance processing framework for a future multichannel compact radar sensor designed for high-altitude platforms (HAPs). Operating at altitudes of 15–25 km in the stratosphere, these platforms can remain in position for several days, enabling persistent, wide-area maritime surveillance across hundreds of square kilometers. The proposed framework, when deployed on such a platform, enables vessel detection, tracking, high-resolution image sequence generation, and estimation of vessel dimensions and movement direction. Furthermore, by leveraging FPGA hardware with parallelized computation, a real-time onboard processing can be achieved. A proof of concept using DLR’s DBFSAR airborne radar system validates the framework for next-generation maritime security applications utilizing HAPs.