Coastal and maritime monitoring using polarimetric and stripmap COSMO SkyMed images

In the context of remote sensing application to land monitoring, the problem of sea and ocean monitoring from SAR images is addressed in this paper. The high-resolution multitemporal and Polarimetric observation capability offered by the current COSMO-SkyMed Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constellation is exploited. Various image processing algorithms based on non-linear filtering, segmentation, and data fusion are presented which help the location of different objects/phenomena, such as ships, surface changes, waves, etc. This work is framed in the context of two projects funded by the Italian Space Agency1. Experiments are performed on COSMO-SkyMed images related to Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Sea (Italy).