Object-oriented sensor data fusion for wide maritime surveillance

The objective of maritime surveillance is to reach a level of situation awareness which allows the timely detection and prevention of events threatening maritime security and environment. Due to the heterogeneous mix of platforms and sensor technologies in use today, there is a need for powerful sensor data fusion architectures. This article introduces an object-oriented approach for the fusion of object observations produced by arbitrary heterogeneous sensors. Different scenarios and sensor configurations as well as fusion algorithms can be evaluated by a simulation tool. The benefits of the architecture are highlighted for an illegal immigration scenario.