Multi-Sensor Data Fusion to Enhance Maritime Situational Awareness

Remote sensing derived information is increasingly supporting maritime situational awareness, addressing the effective understanding of the global maritime domain, including environment, economy, safety and security. Besides the increasing volume of satellite data, the availability of technologies related to the detection and geolocation of electromagnetic signals emanating from vessels, such as Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) maritime transponders and Radio Frequency (RF) emitters, constitute a complementary valuable source of information to localize vessels and characterize their behaviors. The research activity described in this paper aimed at developing and testing a multi-sensor data fusion tool to enhance the exploitation of satellite datasets for maritime surveillance.