Joint use of optical and SAR data for ship detection

Kurzfassung

The German Aerospace Center DLR and DigitalGlobe have been engaged in a modest R&D project to investigate complementary uses of Earth Observation (EO) and Radar data. Coordinated collections of TerraSAR-X and WorldView-1 data during July-August 2009 have been acquired. The near real time alerting/maritime situational awareness application has been tested. The imaging was performed within the same day. The low resolution, large swath radar image was used to detect ships and provide tip-off for high resolution EO imaging which in its turn provides alerts of on-going activity or actual ship ID/type. Data over Bandar Abbas, Iran and Persian Gulf have been acquired and analyzed. DLR own software SAINT was used for ship detection in radar images. The size and heading of a ship is estimated automatically. The velocity of a ship is estimated interactively using a radial velocity component, obtained from an azimuth displacement in radar image, and ship heading. Extracted information is used to predict ship position at the optical image acquisition time in order to provide an alert. First preliminary results are presented.