Remote sensing for maritime traffic understanding

The capability of prompt response in case of critical circumstances occurring within a maritime scenario depends on the awareness level of the competent authorities. From this perspective a quick and integrated surveillance service represents a tool of utmost importance. This is even more true when the main purpose is to tackle illegal activities such as smuggling, waste flooding or malicious vessel trafficking. This work presents an improved version of the OSIRIS system, a previously developed ICT framework devoted to understand the maritime vessel traffic through the exploitation of optical and radar data captured by satellite imaging sensors. A number of dedicated processing units are cascaded with the objective of i) detecting the presence of vessel targets in the input imagery, ii) estimating the vessel types on the basis of their geometric and scatterometric features, iii) estimating the vessel kinematics, iv) classifying the navigation behaviour of the vessel and predicting its route and, eventually, v) integrating the several outcomes within a webGIS interface to easily assess the traffic status inside the considered area. The entire processing pipeline has been tested on satellite imagery captured within the Mediterranean Sea or extracted from public, annotated data sets.