Ship detection using SAR and AIS raw data for maritime surveillance

This paper studies a maritime vessel detection method based on the fusion of data obtained from two different sensors, namely a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and an automatic identification system (AIS) embedded in a satellite. Contrary to most methods widely used in the literature, the present work proposes to jointly exploit information from SAR and AIS raw data in order to detect the absence or presence of a ship using a binary hypothesis testing problem. This detection problem is handled by a generalized likelihood ratio detector whose test statistics has a simple closed form expression. The distribution of the test statistics is derived under both hypotheses, allowing the corresponding receiver operational characteristics (ROCs) to be computed. The ROCs are then used to compare the detection performance obtained with different sensors showing the interest of combining information from AIS and radar.