Detection and classification of offshore artificial objects in TerraSAR-X images: First outcomes of the DeMarine-DEKO project

The project DEKO (Detection of artificial objects in sea areas) is integrated in the DeMarine-Security project and focuses on the detection and classification of ships and off shore artificial objects relying on TerraSAR-X as well as on RapidEye optical images. The DEKO project has been started in Mai 2008. The main expected outcomes of the DEKO project are 1/ the definition of concepts for GMES downstream services based on the obtained results, 2/ the development of new detection and classification algorithms for the analysis of ships and off shore artificial objects and 3/ the validation of the results w.r.t. the sensor acquisition parameters. This paper presents preliminary results obtained in the early stage of the DEKO project like the state of the art on ship detection and classification in SAR images, the currently implemented detection and classification algorithms as well as the first results obtained for ship detection in TerraSAR-X images.