Operational approach for ship detection and classification

The necessity to control all the activities within the marine environment is nowadays vital for most official authorities. Besides protecting the ecosystem and providing safety and surveillance along the transportation corridors, illegal immigration and sustainable economic activities are also issues to cover. Since early nineties, a lot of efforts have been devoted to develop monitoring systems based on transponders (VMS or AIS). Such systems use active on-board devices to track ship positions via satellite communications. Despite of their great performance, the experience has shown, however, that this approach does not have the required independency and other alternatives are necessary. Among them, the one gathering more benefits is the integration of remote sensing, specially Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), with operational transponders. Certainly, this solution provides redundancy, 7/24 and all-weather monitoring capability, independently from the targets to track.