Organisation: WP 2000

Maritime Surveillance

The main objective for the Maritime Surveillance Cluster is to improve the European capability in the field on maritime surveillance in both open and coastal waters for the purposes of security through incorporation, processing, integration and fusion of data and information currently available from state–of–the art maritime surveillance systems and services, along with extension of these systems and services through development and incorporation of new technologies, techniques and sources.

On a S&T level, the objectives include a set of technological improvements applicable to all the areas of the cluster:

• Improve existing fusion techniques of multispectral, hyperspectral and SAR data.
• Detect, classify, and analyse temporal and spatial changes through: Data Mining, Feature extraction and Change detection
  (.e.g. vegetation classification for Pipelines and Land Border) , through the use of mainly VHR optical data.
• Data fusion techniques. Integration and fusion of space–borne and other sources of data in order to improve the added value
  information provided to the user (e.g. real–time sensor output with archived geospatial data).
• Improvements on the detection of slow land–deformation movements through the use of SAR interferometry and the impact
  on critical or vulnerable infrastructures and in particular in buried transportation lines like pipelines.

How will space products benefit the maritime applications of LIMES?

maritime security involves locating and identifying threats illegal activities, in a ‘background’ of empty ocean expanse or more crowded coastal maritime traffic.>
Today, coastal radar is used for this task, alongside airborne and ship-based surveillance, but these and the other existing tools are inadequate to establish anything near a watertight security. The satellite sensors that LIMES aims to bring in will be a welcome supplement to the existing monitoring and surveillance tools.

Within the Maritime Surveillance Cluster, the proposed objectives will contribute to the development of European S&T capabilities in the area of maritime surveillance for the purpose of improving security.
It will do this by building on the work already achieved through other relevant FP and other projects, and ensuring a combination of e xpertise across the EU in the different domains in order to develop an integrated solution to maritime monitoring.

These S&T objectives will contribute to the wider EU societal and policy objectives stated under the FP6 Aeronautics and Space Call by:

• improving the ability of EU authorities (such as Coast Guard, Customs, FMC) to react faster in cases of emergency, suspicious/illegal activity or environmental threat.
• improving dissemination of data to interested parties through improved information sharing.
• improving capability of authorities to provide evidence in cases of fraud or illegal activity.
• aiding conflict resolution through improved information sharing in the open sea.
• providing a sound statistical basis on which to test and justify legislation through repeated
  and reliable information acquisition and management.

 Services & Demonstrations