Special Issue "Remote sensing for maritime and water monitoring"

Remote sensing plays a crucial role in the supervision of extended maritime areas. In particular, multisensor multisource imagery is collected daily through satellite platforms moving on earth-centered orbits. This massive amount of data, including optical images and radar maps, can be exploited for relevant purposes, such as the implementation of maritime surveillance tasks. These tasks typically address security and safety issues (vessel traffic monitoring, search and rescue) as well as environmental sustainability aspects (fishery, pollution). Satellite missions also serve the purpose of remotely measuring meaningful properties of the water column (e.g., salinity, turbidity, pollutants concentration), enabling chemophysical surveys of maritime areas of interest. Publications in this Special Issue will aim at composing a comprehensive overview of the several aspects that emerge in the implementation of maritime observation platforms through data processing. With these topics in mind, among various other subjects, the authors are invited to discuss theoretical issues and methods concerning remote sensing and data processing over the marine and maritime environment (such as software platforms for surveillance or monitoring, processing algorithms for radar or optical imagery, sea-level assessment through satellite altimetry, integrated methods for the observation of the maritime environment, etc.), not excluding application case studies focused on remote sensing within the maritime context. To this purpose, authors are invited to submit contributions that take into consideration the following topics: Maritime data representation, analysis, and learning, Ocean observation applied to fishing sustainability or biodiversity, Techniques for data processing applied to maritime observation, Target detection, classification, and identification in maritime data, Marine pollution monitoring along with sea environment monitoring issues, Open water analysis and trends based on remote sensing.