Ship detection and recognitionin high-resolution satellite images

Nowadays, the availability of high-resolution images taken from satellites, like Quickbird, Orbview, and others, offers the remote sensing community the possibility of monitoring and surveying vast areas of the Earth for different purposes, e.g. monitoring forest regions for ecological reasons. A particular application is the use of satellite images to survey the bottom of the seas around the Iberian peninsula which is flooded with innumerable treasures that are being plundered by specialized ships. In this paper we present a GIS-based application aimed to catalog areas of the sea with archeological interest and to monitor the risk of plundering of ships that stay within such areas during a suspicious period of time.