Preliminary technique to integrate SAR and AIS for ship detection and identification

This paper presents the preliminary technique to design an integrated system for ships recognition by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Automatic Identification System (AIS). The main objective of this work consists of two main stages: The first is to detect the ships near to the port using the SAR and the second is to identify and match the detected ships using AIS with their respective position, size, speed, and course etc. The proposed technique mainly deals with the main stages such as time matching between SAR and AIS data acquisitions and estimation of dead-reckoning (DR) by AIS at the time of image acquisition with known previous positions. Matching was then carried out based on the ships´ hull obtained through SAR and AIS in order to enhance the accuracy in the obtained result. The study was carried out based on the TerraSAR-X image data acquired over the coast of Incheon port on May, 2, 2010 and Tokyo Bay, Japan on May, 30, 2011 at different acquisition times respectively. This study result will provide an important contribution for designing near-real-time operational system for the monitoring of the ships near to coast as well in open sea waters.