Improving maritime situational awareness by fusing sensor information and intelligence

In present-day military security operations threats are more difficult to reveal than in conventional warfare theatres, since they take place during the course of normal life. These maritime missions often take place in littoral environments, where acts of piracy, drug trafficking and other threatening events become obscured in the crowd of everyday fisheries, cargo traders, ferries and pleasure cruises, hindering situation awareness. We aim to improve situation awareness and threat detection capabilities in maritime scenarios by combining sensor-based information with context information and intelligence from various sources. The fusion and analysis in order to reveal suspect from normal behavior is based on domain ontologies. A test bed allows the study of various exploitation and assessments techniques applied to these domain ontologies. Using an appropriate scenario we have simulated suspect and normal behaviour to test the applicability of the various techniques.