Data Fusion for Wide-Area Maritime Surveillance

The integration of vessel traffic monitoring systems, from coastal range to satellite based sensors, is vital to fulfill the requirements related to the safety of navigation and to fight maritime pollution, illegal immigration, illegal fishing, piracy and any other security threats. Our presentation is devoted to address the main data fusion issues arising from the building of a system able to: i) ingest ships’ position reports from different sources (terrestrial and satellite AIS, LRIT), ii) track the vessels within a certain area of interest both in real-time and off-line, iii) provide the final user with a Maritime Situational Picture, and iv) associate non-cooperatively detected vessels to positions from cooperative reporting systems, aimed at the signaling of the presence of ships without any reported data from either AIS or LRIT. Finally, our contribution will show the behavior of the JRC’s prototype platform for maritime situation assessment on data collected within the PMAR (Piracy, Maritime Awareness and Risks) projects around the Horn of Africa and in the Gulf of Guinea.