AIS Assisted Identification and Refocussing of Ships in Airborne SAR Images

Abstract:
The Automatic Identification System (AIS) was established as a cooperative system for maritime surveillance, collision avoidance and combating illegal fishery. However, violations of AIS regulations need to be identified by independent sensors. This paper investigates possibilities for joint evaluation of AIS signals and simultaneously acquired high resolution airborne SAR images with respect to vessel identification and AIS signal integrity. For this purpose DLR’s F-SAR system collected data at the North Sea coast. The AIS data at the time of overflight were used to identify, precisely locate and refocus the vessels in the SAR image.