Remote sensing for maritime prompt monitoring

The main purpose of this paper is to describe a software platform dedicated to sea surveillance, capable of detecting and identifying illegal maritime traffic. This platform results from the cascade pipeline of several image processing algorithms that input Radar or Optical imagery captured by satellite-borne sensors and try to identify vessel targets in the scene and provide quantitative descriptors about their shape and motion. This platform is innovative since it integrates in its architecture heterogeneous data and data processing solutions with the goal of identifying navigating vessels in a unique and completely automatic processing streamline. More in detail, the processing chain consists of: (i) the detection of target vessels in an input map; (ii) the estimation of each vessel's most descriptive geometrical and scatterometric (for radar images) features; (iii) the estimation of the kinematics of each vessel; (iv) the prediction of each vessel's forthcoming route; and (v) the visualization of the results in a dedicated webGIS interface. The resulting platform represents a novel tool to counteract unauthorized fishing and tackle irregular migration and the related smuggling activities.